Oddball
by Gunney
Summary: Post Trail of Blood, Varying POVs. Nikola convinces Helen that there are some loose ends following his attempt to revive the Vampire Race in Sleepers. Read and Review!
1. Part I - Jeff - The Bus

The night was dark and still. It was warm in Old City, unusual so late in the fall. The flower shop had been displaying fewer buds, more leafy green plants that were meant to be kept indoors. A large potted plant that could be set in the corner of the office that, on a cold winter's day, was meant to remind one of the Bahamas. The poinsettias, resting on elevated blocks were nothing but stalks and green pods, waiting for another month before they began to bloom. Christmas cactus and spider plants hung in planters near the top of the illuminated window. The shop was closed but ever the entrepreneurs, the owners had chosen to bathe their produce in a wash of sun lamps regardless of the late hour.

The light from the bay window bled out onto the darkened sidewalk, casting long shadows off the bench and bus stop sign and out into the street. A lone figure sat in that light, closed in on himself, leaning forward with his elbows to his knees, hands tucked in toward his stomach. As if he were cold. As if the air around him was frigid.

He wore a dark three piece suit. Professional enough, off-the-rack, stylish despite the name tag glued to his right lapel that truthfully read "My name is Jeff". Dark blue jacket, light blue shirt, matching trousers. The only pair of black socks that he owned, gray and blue striped tie. On its own the suit looked black, but not beside the actual black of the portfolio he'd carried around most of the day. Amongst the many doubts that rang through his mind that small difference came to the surface. Could it have been that offset, that tiny shift in the color spectrum that turned the investors away?

All during the festival he'd kept a close eye on his competitors. None of them had matched their portfolios. Almost all of them had been dressed in muted and dark professional clothing. None of them were models or clothes horses. Maybe that had been the problem. Maybe he had blended in too well.

Around him the air was still. There were no voices of shoppers, or traffic on the street. Other than the ill visited flower shop this corner of Old City had little to no attraction but for the bus stop at which he waited. It was early in the evening too. Those that could revel were out on the East End, or in the Theatre District or at one of the three hundred and twelve drinking establishments within city limits. Or they were home. A place that he desperately wanted to be at the moment.

The day had been one long failure and he was done with it. He was preparing himself for a short night. Something alcoholic once he got home, to put him to sleep, as many hours of shut eye that he could manage before he had to be up the next morning. Dressing in a uniform that he detested and returning to a job that drained him of all his potential every hour he spent there.

He hated the job. Just the thought of crossing the linoleum and brick threshold, spending eight hours under florescent light listening to the same list of complaints, questions and mindless babble…made him sick to his stomach. He felt even worse now, given the way the festival had gone. It was always that way with him. He would feel hope when another festival approached, excitement at the beginning, tense and angry self-beratement after hours of having his creations over looked or ignored, and when he could take it no longer, the acceptance of failure, defeat, and the horrible return to his apartment, to his job, to his life.

It wasn't that long ago that this cycle had nearly destroyed him. That had been the drug faze. First one thing, prescription pills, things that he could take off the shelf at work without anyone noticing. Then another…the sort of thing you have to have connections to get. Connections from the university, from other pharmacies. Working in a high end store pharmacy had been a blessing then. It'd taken him a year to realize what he was doing to himself. His therapist told him he was one of the lucky few. So many that get into the drug scene never come out.

But he'd escaped. He'd gone to a clinic, some new place in the tropics that he had finagled his way into. He'd been fixed up, he'd been drained out…in only a week he was back on his feet. An empty core of a man, but once again in control of himself.

While he sat on the bench, still waiting for the bus, he rolled down a sleeve and traced his fingertips along the veins sprouting from his wrist. It hadn't been that long ago. The tiny scars were still there. But someone from the clinic had turned him on to these festivals…Inventors Festivals. Monthly gatherings of young scientists, creators, revolutionists. Anything from entertainment to theoretical physics, new laundry detergent solutions to cures for cancer. There was an entrance exam one had to pass, and everything you intended to bring to the festival had to be properly represented, and cleared by the board.

But there would be investors; company's looking for the next stars of the Home Shopping Network or the Gadget Channel. People looking to the future instead of the past.

It was the director of the clinic that told him about it, he'd grinned through his tan and said, "Something to do whenever you think about de drugs again," with his thick Germanic accent.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

The bus came, groaning to a halt, hissing as the brakes activated and the door swung open. Jeff stood, grabbing the portfolio and letting it hang loosely at his side. He almost felt disdain for it as he climbed up the steps, dropped his fare into the collection box by the driver then swung into the first seat. The bus was mostly empty. That should have occurred to him as odd.

He'd only caught a brief glimpse of the young man near the very back, the dark haired woman sitting at the halfway point to the right. He hadn't even really looked at the driver, hidden behind a sheet of dark plastic that was meant to protect him from less than friendly passengers. If he had he might not have boarded the bus. He might also have demanded to be let off the bus when it left the scheduled route, turning west and then north instead of south.

He only really snapped out of his daze when the window was suddenly filled with the towering buildings and architecture of Historic Old City. Most of the buildings belonged to the oldest families. They were behind thick gates and top of the line security fences. Their occupants and their reason for still existing were a mystery that only the richest of the rich knew. The bus turned toward the ramping driveway of one of the largest estates and paused there and Jeff finally looked around. The driver, not much more than a shadow, was leaning away from the plastic screen mumbling something into what had to be a radio. The dark haired woman had moved closer, now sitting only a seat away and staring right at him. She had blue eyes, very lovely blue eyes.

Jeff felt his heart speed up, and could smell his own sweat. He jumped when a throat was cleared right behind him and the young man who had been at the back of the bus leaned forward, now seated directly behind the would-be-inventor. Jeff shifted in the seat, moving to the very edge and leaning away from now two pairs of eyes directed solely at him.

"I-I uh.." Jeff blinked and swallowed around a dry throat, his gaze snapping back and forth between the woman and the man. "I think I should get off the bus now."

"I really wish you wouldn't." The woman said, with a surprisingly clear English accent. Her lips perked in a calm smile, her eyes never losing their focus on him. She was polite about it, but there was an unmistakable sense of command there. Jeff got the feeling that it was in fact best for him to sit in his seat, and do nothing else. He looked to the young man, who appeared to read his mind then nod in agreement. Yes it would be best to do as the woman said.

The bus moved again, driving through the gate that Jeff had missed seeing open. From there they traveled along a brief tree lined drive then around and toward the back of the giant structure that he didn't remember noticing before this and he had lived in Old City most of his life. Tall spires, turrets, cathedral windows, a castle and a mansion and a church all molded artistically, somehow, into one giant structure that loomed in the darkness. He only had a few glimpses before the road turned, descended and pulled the bus into a pitch black tunnel.

The close walls amplified the sound of the engine but he could still hear his heart beating erratically. All that the bus's lights illuminated was the road and seeing the asphalt sweep by told him nothing. He stood, swaying with the motion of the bus, took two steps forward into the aisle, clinging to the seat back, felt a pinprick of pain in his upper arm seconds after a hand closed over his wrist, then blackness.


	2. Part I - Jeff - The Cell

Jeff was awake and warm. His brain was throbbing a mile a minute, the painful result of too much drink. Clearly he'd been more depressed than he'd thought when he got home. With a groan he lifted his hands away from his chest under a soft blanket, to his face and pressed his palms down over his eyelids. The pressure both helped and enraged his headache. Hurt. He would need Tylenol and lots of it if he was going to survive work.

Work! Lifting his hands Jeff jerked his eyes to the left, to where his night stand and alarm clock sat. What time was it? He couldn't afford to be late, and definitely not as the result of a hangover.

But there was no alarm clock there. No bed stand, no faux fleur de lis wall paper, and no shaded window. All he saw was a gray, brick wall. His eyes widened, his brain trying to take in everything at once, desperately seeking out answers.

Had he not made it home? Was this jail? Jeff lifted his head, groaned, then pushed with his elbows, hoping that he wouldn't find metal bars at the end of the brick wall. There were no bars. A giant mirror, but no bars. From where he lay he could see the top of the room reflected in the glass, where a giant caged light hung from the ceiling, for the moment dark.

Maybe not jail.

Jeff pushed himself up further, fighting the rolling in his stomach, wincing at the stiff pain in his left arm. Why did his arm hurt so much anyway? He rubbed at it, his eyes squeezed shut, desperate not to vomit all over a strange floor in a strange room. It took a moment, but he got himself under control. He was sweating, shaky, like he had consumed nothing but coffee for days. This wasn't the result of a hangover. This was something else.

"The nausea will pass."

Jeff jumped, causing the bed to rattle and creak. The sound distracted him for a millisecond and he stared at the chipped white paint on the bed rails. A hospital bed. The kind you might find in an insane asylum. Then he was seeking out the voice. It had come from the corner of the room, from the mouth of a man who would have remained unseen if he'd stayed quiet. Long and thin, piercing eyes, a smirk at the corner of narrow lips. Seated in a straight back chair with one leg over the other, clad in shirt sleeves of all things. Just barely at the cusp of modern fashion.

It reminded Jeff of someone so completely that he felt himself instantly transported back in time. Seven months ago. The Bahamas. Bright sunlight, hot nurses, and one week of his life that he could only barely remember. And words of advice delivered as he left, delivered in a strong accent with more life to them than he thought possible.

"Doctor Baumschlagger?"

The figure in the corner, managing not to wrinkle anything despite his casual posture, grinned at the recognition then shrugged and glanced theatrically away. "Well," he sighed, "…not really. But as you once knew me, yes. Nice to see your memory has improved."

Jeff tried to stand but he felt his knees weaken and changed his mind. The bed creaked when he sat again and he looked at the mattress, still jumpy. The room was barren but for the bed and the chair that Baumschlagger or whoever he was sat in. As he looked around Jeff caught sight of a camera in the corner of the ceiling above the mirror. This had to be a jail cell, or an isolation room or something. Cameras, a mirror that had to be two way, and the German Doctor (who somehow managed to lose a thick accent in only seven months) sitting pleased as a peacock in the corner.

"Am I…am I in trouble?" Jeff asked. When the doctor didn't answer Jeff looked at him again. All he got was a familiar pair of eyes staring right back. Miffed Jeff shook his head, groaned at the pain of his brains rolling around in his skull, then tried standing again. He was dizzy, his stomach complained, but he stayed on his feet. Bare feet.

Jeff stared down at the floor and for the first time realized that he was no longer wearing his suit. He had on scrubs, light blue. The top had a little pocket. Someone…Jeff sent an accusatory glance toward the quiet man in the corner…had taken his clothing, which included his wallet and ID, his portfolio…slowly the memory of the bus came back to him. The woman and the man, the trip into the dark tunnel. Jeff shoved the left sleeve of the shirt up and found the small bruised patch where he'd been injected.

"Am I being kidnapped?" Jeff asked, turning and taking a step towards Baumschlagger. "Are you government? Is-is this some kind of experimental site or something?"

The figure in the corner frowned and groaned softly shaking his head and making a tsk tsk noise with his tongue. "Oh, if I'd known you were the conspiracy type…" He said, obviously deeply disappointed. He unfolded himself from the chair then stood, striding out of the shadowed corner, his eyes focused up at the camera for a moment before he twisted on a heel and faced Jeff. "Sit down."

Jeff narrowed his eyes then sat on the edge of the bed.

"You remember what I told you when you left the clinic? Words of wisdom, about the inventors conventions and about expanding your horizons?"

Jeff gave a tiny nod, opening his mouth to voice a question.

"As it turns out that was terrible advice. In fact I made a mistake in even treating you myself. I would have done you far greater justice if I had left you in your drug addled state."

Jeff's mouth was still hanging open. Somewhere in the world there had to be another human being that actually understood what the non-German, questionable physician was saying. It was a shame that that person wasn't in the room with him.

"Instead I carelessly…" Baumschlagger did his dramatic pause again, eyes flitting toward the ceiling while his hands gesticulated searching for a word. "Heartlessly used you as part of a horrific experiment that the government would never have allowed on homeland soil. Shame on me."

Jeff snapped his mouth shut and worked his jaw. It was hard to miss the total lack of sincerity in the doctor's voice. He narrowed his eyes and waited through what was more and more resembling a performance instead of an explanation.

"I have however found a way to reverse the ill effects of this terrible thing that I've done to you, which will only take a few moments of your time…" Baumschlagger reached into a pocket and pulled out a medically sealed plastic envelope. "And a small amount of your blood."

The envelope contained a hypodermic needle attached to a plastic phalange and a test tube designed specifically to fit into the phalange. It would literally take only moments for Baumschlagger to extract a blood sample. From another pocket the doctor was drawing a length of rubber tubing.

"A small amount?" Jeff asked, scooting further back on the bed.

The doctor gave him a grim smile while he wrapped the tube around Jeff's upper arm, cinching it tight. Jeff waited for the smell of alcohol and the cool swipe of a cloth passing over his skin, some sort of preparation before he was jabbed with the needle, but it never came.

"Aren't you going to disinfect the- ow." The needle was plunged inexpertly into his arm, the vein missed entirely. Baumschlagger gave a soft grunt while he pulled the needle back out, then pushed it back in again. The first puncture bled, the second produced what the doctor was after.

"There we are…" He muttered, clearly pleased and not at all concerned about the patient in his hands.

"How long have you been a doctor again?"

"Hmm?" Light grey blue eyes glanced up, distracted, before returning to the puckering skin at Jeff's elbow. "Oh. Well," With the test tube now sufficiently full Baumschlagger yanked the needle free, stepped out of reach of the blood that followed it and reached into his pocket again to pull out a kerchief which he handed to Jeff. "Four weeks…give or take."

A second later the giant bulb on the ceiling came to life with a loud clang. In the light now flooding the room Jeff fully recognized the other man, and yet there was something very different about him. Before Jeff could pin point the difference the non-Germanic, non-medical professional slipped the vial of blood into a pocket, took two steps towards the door of the room, pulled it open and was gone, his hurried footsteps receding down the hall.

For a long moment Jeff sat staring at the door, his hand pressing the kerchief he'd been given against his bleeding arm. He had the vague idea that what had just happened was a bad sign, and probably very illegal. He also put together the so-called-doctor's behavior with that of someone about to be caught in doing something illegal.

He was preparing to stand up and go to the open doorway when the dark haired woman from the bus swung into the room. She was slightly out of breath and carrying what looked like an overgrown phaser in her hands. Her eyes traveled from the bloodied cloth in Jeff's hands to the discarded plastic on the floor, the used needle on the bed sheet and the generally baffled look on his face before she swore. "Bloody hell. Stay here."

Then she took off down the hall as well, heading in the same direction as the…other guy, shouting commands into a radio.

Jeff stood and shuffled across the cool tile floor to stick his head out into the hall. He was about to take a step out of the cell when a strong hand clapped down on his shoulder, the shoulder attached to his now severely bruised arm. He winced, looked to the exceptionally hirsute appendage that was guiding him back into the room then followed the arm to the sleeve of a blue t-shirt.

"You should stay in here." A gruff voice said, following the statement with a series of soft grunts. Jeff felt the edges of reality start to crumble, nodded at the giant ape man that was guiding him to his bed, then quietly returned to the darkness from whence he had come.


	3. Part I - Jeff - The Library

Jeff stood in the library, alone but for the books and their silent voices. He'd already walked its considerable length, looked out through the bay of windows, sampled the sandwiches, cookies and tea set out on the table in the center of the room and actually pulled a book from the shelves. It was a classic. An old tome that discussed, amongst other things, the viability of Darwin's 'new' theory of evolution. A first edition, hundreds of years old. It felt brand new.

Returning it to the shelf Jeff scanned more of the titles. The books were fastidiously arranged according to the Dewey decimal system, but none of them had been marked with call numbers. They were as they had been when first purchased.

The shelves he stood before were non-fiction, starting with religion and the science of dreams at one end through to collections of poems where the walls of the room met. The poetry books had shown a little more wear and tear, some of the spines stained with what had to be juice or wine.

He'd noticed some more modern book jackets on the opposite side of the room and one shelf, set apart from all the others, had a collection of gun magazines carefully organized on it. The latest editions were laid out on top, but they were a year old.

An odd room, but what more did he expect from the rich.

The dark haired woman from the bus had introduced herself as Helen Magnus. She had been the one to greet him when he woke for the third time. She had with her a change of clothing and the promise of a real explanation. From his cell ( a word that Miss Magnus strongly disapproved of), she led him up a set of stairs that had locked doors on either end, down a second dark hallway, up another set of stairs and finally into late afternoon sunlight filtering into a large entryway. Dark woods, ornate walls, browns and russets greeted him; all of it tasteful, wealthy, and very old school.

Miss Magnus told him that where he found himself was called the Sanctuary, and the reason for that name would also be included in the future explanation.

"For now I'm sure you'll want to freshen up. I have some business to attend to but I will meet with you in the library the moment I'm free."

She was bright, happy, very English and hiding something behind her lovely blue eyes. Something in the set of her shoulders under the white blouse, the stiffness of her legs looking just the right amount of classy in the pencil skirt and heels. It was the same something that had made her 'bloody hell' so memorable to him.

"The library is…" Jeff asked, speaking over the pile of clothes before he was shown into a large bathroom.

"I'll have someone take you there." She said with a tight smile. She was polite, informative, and clearly comfortable in the environment. But she wasn't someone's secretary. She was the one in charge in this 'Sanctuary', whatever it was.

Jeff nodded his thanks and ducked into the full bath setting the pile of clothing on a counter. At the sink he leaned toward the mirror and stared at his own face for a moment. Blood shot brown eyes, reddish brown hair sticking on end, spindly, skinny and now bruised arms poking out of an oversized scrub shirt. Maybe the irritation hiding just under Miss Magnus's you're-welcome-in-my-home attitude was aimed at him. His appearance alone was unacceptable. Letting himself be kidnapped on a city bus then having his blood stolen by a fake doctor with a fake accent made him entirely unworthy of an audience with the rich and reclusive.

Chagrined Jeff stepped into the shower, shaved with the equipment he found in one of the drawers, dressed in the brand new jeans, shirt, jacket and shoes and opened the door cautiously when he was done. Across the hall, leaning against the wall with an electronic tablet in his hand was yet another resident of the Sanctuary that he didn't recognize.

In fact if it weren't for the fact that Jeff's hair was red and he'd never been able to pull off facial hair without looking grungy, the two might have been brothers.

"Hi. I'm Henry Foss." The stranger said, leaning away from the wall to offer a hand.

"Jeff O'Donnel. Hi." Jeff shook with Henry, and then stood with him in an awkward silence that managed to basically describe their relationship to one another. Total strangers, one at home, one an alien.

"Magnus had some food sent to the library for ya. I'm supposed to make sure you get there."

There was something refreshingly open and honest about Henry. Willingly Jeff fell into step with the other man as they traveled down the hall.

"Gotta admit that sounds good. I don't even know how long it's been since I last ate."

Henry winced a little in sympathy. "Ah, well, assuming you ate before we…you know…um..about two days."

By the time they reached the library Henry's tablet had squawked at him a dozen times. His fingers were flying over the glossy surface already working on the issues presenting themselves. Leaving Jeff at the library, Henry walked away, distractedly promising that Magnus would join him shortly and with the food calling to him, Jeff didn't bother to follow.

That had, however, been almost an hour ago. It was 5:10 according to the grandfather clock on the mantel and the sun was setting. Jeff counted almost 59 hours of time spent wondering what in hell was going on and even with the sense of curiosity that had made him an amateur inventor in the first place, he was running thin on patience.

"I apologize deeply, Mr. O'Donnel. We don't often have guests, and we've never before had a guest with circumstances such as yours." As if summoned by his impatience, Magnus stood in the doorway, her hands in front of her, fingers laced. Whatever tension she had been hiding before seemed to have been resolved and released. Jeff turned from the window as she walked into the room, headed for the tea service at the end of the table. "You've been waiting patiently for quite some time, and I understand the confusion you are feeling. I'll do my best to answer your questions as I can but…some of what you want to know will have to remain a mystery, for the time being."

Quietly she poured tea into two china cups, setting one in front the chair nearest to the head of the table. Clearly she meant it for him, and she meant for him to join her. She sat before her own cup, unconsciously plying the steaming liquid with sugar and lemon. Seeing no reason to leave a lady sitting on her own Jeff sat as well and after a moment's thought, plunked a sugar cube into his cup.

He stirred, she stirred. She sipped, he sipped. She seemed a lot more pleased with her drink, than he was with his. But then he'd never been a tea drinker.

She sat for a moment, manicured finger tips resting against the lip of her cup, her eyes meeting his before she took in a breath and began.

"By now you must realize that this all has to do with your time under the care of…who you might have known as Dr. Baumschlagger."

"You mean the unlicensed conman that stole my blood earlier today?" Jeff asked, rubbing at his sore arm.

Miss Magnus smiled, a look that was sympathetic, mildly condescending and almost fond. Jeff must have given her a shocked look in return. Her eyes widened and the smile disappeared. She cleared her throat and laced her fingers together on the table top, back to business.

"I blame myself for the lapse in security that allowed him into your room. We underestimated his abilities, given how new they are. Believe me it won't happen again."

"So…he's what…black market or something? Steals people's blood so that he can…sell it.."

Miss Magnus gave him that same condescending smile. He was way off track, and he knew it the minute her teeth appeared. She sat, brows furrowed, considering her approach. When she finally decided Jeff could see a flicker of delight cross behind her eyes.

"His name is Nikola Tesla. And he's a vampire."

Jeff laughed after four seconds of silence had passed. He expected her to laugh as well, join in the fun of the joke but she didn't and he became silent again. He looked around the room, expecting a camera somewhere, a crew of people hiding out waiting for the culmination of the gag. But the room was empty and still. Jeff picked up his tea cup and brought it to his lips under the unchanging gaze of Helen Magnus. The cup trembled and Jeff barely managed to get it back onto the saucer without dumping the hot liquid all over himself.

He shifted sideways in the chair and folded his arms in front of him awkwardly, leaning his right shoulder against the chair back. He took a few breaths and opened his mouth in preparation to ask a question, any question that might ground him once more in reality. Before he got the chance Magnus interrupted him.

"You're a vampire too. Or so I have to assume given Nikola's behavior."

The door of the library opened breaking the brief silence. The young man that had been on the bus two days ago leaned in now covered in mud, including his mega-phaser, wearing torn stealth clothing and out of breath, as if he'd run a marathon.

"Magnus..oh. Uh…"

"What is it Will?" Helen asked, standing.

"Tesla. We got him."

Magnus sighed and nodded then turned back to face Jeff, who was having trouble breathing. She cocked her head in concern and reached a hand out, placing it lightly on Jeff's shoulder.

"Will you be alright?" She asked.

Jeff nodded.

"You should…probably stay here. I'll return shortly." Her tone apologetic, glossed lips frowning, Magnus gave him a reassuring and very English wink, then turned and strode purposefully out of the room.


	4. Part I - Jeff - The Office

Chapter 4

Walking from the library Jeff ruled out secret government facility. He hadn't seen any government types, or suits or uniforms. The place felt more like a dormitory for a reform school than it did a top level secret facility. The tasteful décor easily outweighed the number of locked doors and security cameras. And while the cameras were top quality, and loaded with various sensor arrays, they weren't obtrusive. He wasn't an expert on architecture but he was fairly certain that this part of the "Sanctuary" was meant to be residential, first and foremost.

His other clue to the mystery was Magnus, though she really wasn't much of a clue. She was a conundrum, a wizened old woman, a mother, a leader, a thinker, all wrapped into one very lovely package. Clearly there was something going on between her and this Tesla fella. The dark haired conman (Jeff refused to use the v-word) was a bad guy, but apparently not as much of a bad guy if Helen was led to smile fondly while explaining the dastardly things he had done to the helpless and forlorn.

Having one of her employees burst into the library covered in mud didn't faze her any more than throwing around accusations about mythical creatures or kidnapping strangers on a hijacked city bus. And yet when he'd sat watching her fix a cup of tea, sighing with satisfaction at its taste, she had seemed every bit as normal as any other English woman.

Jeff went from door to door, trying each one. Most were locked. There had to have been hundreds of rooms and yet so far he'd only seen five people.

Another idea occurred. Weren't rich people given to crafting live action games to break the monotony?

Maybe this was all some giant amusement. That might explain the theatrical so-called vampire, the dramatic tension in the air, the layers of conspiracy. He rubbed at his sore arm. Would they really go so far as to drug him and extract blood, though, just for the sake of the game? And why him of all people?

Down yet another hall, outside a set of double doors, Jeff paused when he heard angry voices. They were dampened by the wood until he pressed an ear to the crack.

"You could have wiped out all of the cameras, unlocked every door in the SHU with that stunt. Did you even think of the catastrophe that would cause?" That was Magnus, spitting mad. "Oh. I should have known the minute you conjured up this loose end that you had your own goals, instead of foolishly believing you might actually have decided to do something altruistic for once."

"I was in control, Helen. It was only one EM pulse, and shouldn't you rather be considering the lapses in security that my 'stunt' has so effectively revealed. By my calculations, the Wunder Wolf has some catch up work to do-"

"Leave Henry out of it, and stop changing the subject. Your reckless behavior not only endangered the lives of half a dozen young people…"

"Brats."

"But you have created a massive information leak that will take weeks to repair, not to mention completely and unnecessarily disrupting the life of yet another innocent."

"Oh and kidnapping him wasn't a disruption?"

There was a pause in the conversation, Jeff shifted his stance and put his ear a little closer to the crack in the door.

"We have protocols. We were following them. There was a way we could have done this and returned Mr. O'Donnel to his home none the wiser. By revealing yourself to him you have not only destroyed our efforts but endangered your own existence in the process."

The male voice in the room, which could only have been Tesla, scoffed at the suggestion.

"Hardly. I haven't got an existence to endanger."

"Oh Nikola!" Helen groaned, angrily. Jeff turned his head, trying to see through the crack. He got a brief glimpse of Helen walking away from a desk cluttered with papers before a muddied suit jacket blocked his view.

"And…" Nikola said, persistent. "As it turns out…Mr. O'Donnel is actually of no use to me…"

"What?"

"I injected some of the blood, it did nothing. I am just as useless now as I have been for the past six interminably long months, are you happy?" The jacket moved again, revealing Helen's slightly paler face. Tesla's words had stunned her into silence.

She sat perched on the edge of the desk, crossing her arms in front of her as the information sank in. There was the sound of a body slumping into an arm chair and her gaze lowered at the same time. He didn't know what it meant, but Jeff didn't like the way Helen's face drained of energy and life.

"He's the right man. I'm certain of that." Nikola continued, and a long fingered hand slipped into Jeff's narrow view, fingers open, palm up. A gesture of helplessness. "Clearly he is no longer drug dependent as he once was. As much as it chagrins me to admit, Junior may have been…he m-might have been correct."

"The time release..?" Helen asked.

Nikola sighed in affirmation.

"My original research had indicated that there could be problems of longevity, increasing exponentially with the relative stage of maturation of the subject. With the…Brat Pack…I was certain of success. Mr. O'Donnel was a wild card. In point of fact it wasn't I, but my staff, who started treating him. Only after I discovered that they had included him into my experimental group did I follow through."

"An accident?" Helen asked, disbelief coloring her face again. Nikola's hand flitted, agitated, in and out of view. "You _accidentally_ turned him into a vampire?"

"NOT a vampire. Had it worked, I would be back to my true self and-"

"And not shedding mud all over my office…and my chair. Did it occur to you that his altered DNA is dormant?"

"Of course."

"I suppose I should be grateful you didn't try to kill him first."

"Yes well he woke up too soon for that." Tesla mumbled, and his hand disappeared completely from view.

Jeff felt his heart rate speed up. He'd reminded himself that he was the subject of the discussion and that his death had narrowly been avoided. Worse still both Nikola and Helen were discussing the near-miss as though it were a cricket game score.

"Unbelievable…" Helen muttered, her eyes rolling up and around the room as she shook her head. It took Jeff a moment to realize that when they came to rest, they were looking at the small crack through which his world had been opened. Helen was looking directly at him. He caught the tiniest of movements in her lips, a brief frown that he knew was meant only for him, then she turned her attention back to the vampire…ex-vampire.

"Where is the test tube?"

"Shattered, tossed in the muck. Your boy can attest to that." Nikola groused.

"You're certain there was no change."

Tesla's hand popped into view, a sharp gesture that answered sarcastically in the affirmative.

"Get cleaned up, and for your own sake, stay here." Helen said then stood and traveled behind her desk, sitting down behind a large stack of files that almost completely obscured her from view.

Jeff backed away, heard Tesla stand and stroll toward the door, and hurried down the hall to the corner, ducking out of sight just as Helen's office doors opened. He waited for the mud covered scientist to pass him before he ventured back down the way he'd come. The doors to Magnus' office still hung open. Before he got within ten feet of the door her voice called to him.

"Be careful of the mess when you come in, I don't want it tracked any more than it is."

Jeff stepped slowly over the threshold, eyeing the boot prints of wet, slimy brown staining the wood and carpet. He steered wide of them as he narrowed the gap between the door and the cluttered desk. Helen met his eyes and gave him a brave, buck-up-young-man sort of smile.

"I had wondered how long it would take for you to venture out on your own." She said.

Jeff looked to the piles of papers scattered in front of her and the expensive fountain pen poised gracefully in her hand. The room was full of so many artifacts, statues, resource materials, and knick knacks from by gone ages, he knew it would take a life time to explore it all. Two life times to have been the one to collect it all.

"There's so much here…" He said, trailing off. "Kinda impossible to stay in one place."

Helen followed his gaze, appearing to lose herself in memories that Jeff couldn't possibly fathom. They both looked around the room before Helen drew in a sharp breath.

"There is a great deal we have to do here, Mr. O'Donnel."

"Jeff."

"And very little of that involves returning you to your former life."

Jeff nodded slightly, quirking his head to the side, narrowing his eyes. "Meaning…"

"Meaning that you have two options once we're certain that you're whole and healthy. The first is that you remain a resident of the Sanctuary for the rest of your life, confined to these walls and grounds, dead to the world for all intents and purposes."

"Ah…" Jeff said, his eyes widening, the blood starting to rush again. "And the second option."

"Clearly Nikola saw something in you. Something of value that even someone as narcissistic as he is found worthwhile. I could use someone like that in our work. If you were to accept I could answer more of your questions. You would receive training, and could become a part of what I consider the most important and rewarding job on the planet."

Even before he realized it himself, Jeff could see a hint of triumph in Helen's eyes. She had just offered him the greatest incentive he could have imagined, an offer that he literally could not turn down, and she knew it.

"Do I still get to be a vampire?" He asked.

Helen chuckled but shook her head. "Probably not."

Jeff sighed in mock disappointment. He'd only just barely grasped what this place was, who Magnus was, how any of it could be possible. The place was enormous, and he got the feeling that the knowledge and discoveries hidden behind the closed doors would be even bigger. Forget the Inventor's Conventions. And forget ever returning to his work-a-day miserable past life.

Vampire or no vampire, this was the chance of a lifetime.

Jeff stuck his hand out and Helen took it, shaking with just the right amount of strength.

"Ok." He said.


	5. Part II - Magnus - The Halls

Chapter 5

_Unconscionable. That's the sort of word Nikola would use. His actions today were distractingly so. Will gave me his report shortly after they returned with Nikola in tow. He had escaped the Sanctuary via the sewers; a route that Will and Henry __agree__ had to have been prepared ahead of time. What Nikola might have been able to do once with his vampire strength, he can now only hope to accomplish with his magnetic abilities. Of course since his 'de-vamping' I've taken pity on him, and have made the mistake of giving him free reign of the Sanctuary. _

_Will sprained his ankle in the chase, slipping in a puddle of something that he kindly refused to drag into the Sanctuary. Henry too looked unusually stiff but refused to discuss his injuries. Both declared that they would care for themselves. When I asked them where Nikola was, Will glared angrily at me and said, "With the Big Guy." _

_The mud Nikola tracked into my office is still there, drying into the carpet. He was petulant and uncooperative but seemed to have fared better than the other two. I asked him if O'Donnel's blood had any affect and he answered me, directly, the way he always has, to the negative. But he was quiet when he left. No protest, no lascivious invitations. He even looked the part. Defeated, drained, and tired. But I have learned over the years that Nikola isn't to be trusted when he's quiet. _

_Mr. O'Donnel heard the argument between Nikola and I. When he came into my office afterwards he said, "There's so much here…" His words forced me to look at everything I had collected over the years. Presents from Gregory, artifacts from recent and distant expeditions. Baubles that would collect dust if it wasn't for the constant attention of my dear friend. Even now I find myself distracted by their presence in a way I've never been before. _

_Despite my long __history__ I find that I almost constantly live in the future. Looking ahead always to the next threat, the next creature, the next budget cut. The few times that I've looked back have been to mourn someone now lost to me. The only exception to that rule is that damned Serbian. His memories of the past are so different from mine. He was always vibrant and alive and triumphant. Is that arrogance? Conceit? Pride? _

_What is it that Nikola sees in this young man? I've watched the security __video__, what little there is of it, several times. All that can be clearly observed is Nikola's entry into the cell, his botched attempt at murder, then O'Donnel waking and Nikola scurrying into a dark corner. According to Will, Nikola wasn't carrying any weapons and I know he never dropped any in the cell or the halls. Perhaps murder is an exaggeration. _

_Mr. O'Donnel's files show no great amount of wealth hidden away. He is intelligent and inquisitive, shy but curious. Not what I expected when Nikola first brought him and his predicament to my attention. He is nothing like the wealthy, spoiled children that caused so many __problems__ half a year ago. I hardly believe Nikola treated him unintentionally, very little of what he does happens coincidentally. There is a secondary motive here. _

_If James were still alive I would greatly enjoy his counsel. My thoughts of him are another reason never to live in the past. _

_*From the personal journal of Helen Magnus_

Helen set her pen down and buried her face behind her finger tips, rubbing at the weariness that had made her eyes start to burn and caused her face to go numb. It was well past midnight. It was already another day. Halfway through her entry, if she was to be totally accurate, she should have drawn a line marking a new day. A new challenge.

The Sanctuary around her was quiet. The stillness of her office had only been broken by the occasional chime on her cell. Texts from Will or Kate or the Big Guy confirming that various chores around the Sanctuary had been completed. The computer on her desk, something she had chosen to exclude from her brief personal journal entries, showed her camera footage of the empty halls, the locked enclosures, and the vacant grounds.

Perhaps she could sleep now.

Helen left her desk and exited her office, before she began her nightly trip through the abandoned halls toward her room. As she walked she took off first one heel, then the other. 150 years had greatly improved the comfort of women's shoes, even the most vicious of styles, and yet there was nothing more enjoyable than the end of the day when she was able to slip out of them.

The polished wood was cool against her feet. Even with her shoes off her footsteps echoed in the vast silence. She climbed the central stair case after confirming that the front door was secured.

On the second level she passed Kate's room, silent and dark. She slowed when she passed what used to be Ashley's room. It wasn't that long ago that she had begun forcing herself not to check the room every night.

Henry's room light was on and muted music played from within. Probably already working on fixing the damage Tesla had caused. The genius himself had chosen to inhabit the top most level of the Sanctuary. Magnus felt a little better knowing he would be a floor discouraged should he decide to roam at night.

She continued on down the hall, rounding the corner, passing the window that Henry once crashed through. Before he had chosen to accept who and what he was, and seen his abilities as a gift and not a curse.

She wasn't surprised to find Will awake, though she was curious to know why he had stationed himself directly in front of one of the guest rooms. He had a chair with him but that had been engulfed in a cascade of files. Will was on the floor, one ankle wrapped and stretched out to the side, the other tucked under him, peering through a pair of glasses at a thick sheaf of papers stapled together.

"Will?"

The blonde jerked his head up in surprise, squinted at Helen, then looked at his watch.

"Magnus. Wow. It's later than I thought." He sighed and removed the spectacles, rubbing at his eyes.

"Is everything alright?" She asked, carefully stepping around some of the papers that might actually have been organized in piles. When Will looked up again Magnus nodded to the door he had essentially barricaded. Will followed her gaze.

"Oh. Yeah I just wanted to keep an eye on him."

"Who?"

"Jeff." Will said, as if reminding her of something she already knew. When he didn't get the response he wanted Will continued, "Henry got him settled in there a few hours ago."

"He isn't a threat, Will."

Shaking his head Will turned his eyes back to the work he was doing, arranging the papers on the floor with a complicated sequence of arm motions until they had settled into an organization system that only he understood. "Uh uh, he's been Tesla'd. Something is going on."

"Tesla'd?"

"Touched, tainted, involved." Will said, affecting his passable Sean Connery impersonation. "In some way or other altered by the great Nikola Tesla." He shrugged, hands now full of more papers. "Anything the professor touches comes back to bite us, every time."

It was clever and Magnus smiled, resisting the laugh that might have been a little too much like agreement.

"I know he claims that the blood didn't do anything," Will continued, "…but he never gives up that easily. He's got something else going on. I can feel it."

"And what is all this?"

"A little research. " Will mumbled, staring around at the ring of piles before he found the one he was looking for and snatched at the file folder on top. Each of them was stamped with a specific seal that designated which Sanctuary the files belonged to. These bore the stamp for the London Sanctuary. They were copies of the originals but she still found it odd.

"London?" She asked, picking up one of the folders and checking the date. She recognized the hand writing immediately. All of the files were older, up to and including the very last that James Watson had filed before he died.

She looked to Will who had become pensive. The young man nodded, his eyes lost in the distance. "He always seemed to know the missing pieces. AND he kept a very close eye on Tesla. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff he..."

Helen smiled, when Will stopped himself. She nodded in confirmation of his realization. She knew very well what Tesla was capable of.

"Uh..anyway. I found this in our files." Will pushed himself to his feet, wincing when he was forced to put weight on his injured ankle. He handed a collection of papers to Magnus, the contents of which were easily described by the legend at the top of the first page.

It read, "A History of Sanguine Vampiris" by Nikola Tesla.

"Oh god..." Helen moaned and glanced over the first few lines.

_Long before man was even capable of marking the passage of time and homo sapiens, like all other mammals, grunted and groveled in the dirt with little to show for they daily struggles but for scratches on cave walls; there was a species so highly evolved in all matters of science, culture and physiology as to be considered no less than gods. They ruled over the surface of the Earth, and over the underworld, for eons. During this time there were no wars or famines. The ruling class and the working class were as one, with all resources shared equally among them. These were called sanguine vampirus, beings of exceptional grace, beauty and intelligence-_

"Uh...it reads like his autobiography." Helen muttered distastefully, shaking her head.

"He has an autobiography?"

"Oh yes. Gave each of the Five a signed copy when it was published. It has the same air of self-adoration to it. Written in third person of course."

"Huh.."

"Will, I understand your concerns, but I seriously doubt that Mr. O'Donnel will be a danger to us. At least not tonight."

Though he didn't protest Magnus could see that Will wasn't going to agree with her. He hadn't known Nikola long enough to understand when the man could be trusted, and there were those times. In fact all he had seen of Nikola was recklessness and his arrogance.

"Get some sleep, Will." Helen said, putting a matronly hand on his shoulder before she continued toward her own bedroom.

There was something underlying everything Nikola did. A fierce sense of self-preservation that, when pushed, ultimately appeared as heartlessness and selfishness at its purest. Even before he had injected himself with the Source Blood there were those in the scientific community that would quickly attest to Nikola's lack of humanity.

For all that Nikola wasn't, he _was_ honest. At his very center he was true to himself and to those around him. His way of deceiving was to leave truths out of what he said, more than project falsehoods. The solution became introducing incentives, convincing him to reveal everything before it was too late.

Helen stopped at the end of the hall, turned to the left and entered her bedroom. Inside the fire had been lit in her fire place, her covers turned down, a cup of tea had been left at her bedside, unfortunately grown cold. She had her suspicions as to who left her room in that state and smiled softly at his thoughtfulness.

She pulled off her jacket and laid it across a chair back, slinging her heels under the chair. Was she too tired for a bath, or would that be just the thing to calm her completely and allow for sleep?

She was reaching for the zipper between her shoulder blades when the shot rang out.

Just one shot, from within the Sanctuary. She felt her chest seize and she crossed to her door in two strides, yanking it open and rushing into the hall. Her eyes met Will's where he stood, still working on the mound of files.

"Where was it-" Helen began.

"I thought it came-" Will finished, pointing at the ceiling.

"Nikola.." Helen breathed before she charged up the stairs.


	6. Part II - Magnus - The Loft

Chapter 6

Helen flew up the stairs in seconds, her feet barely touching the carpeted wood. She rounded the corner and shot up to the second landing barely giving her eyes time to adjust to the darkness on the third level. Before Nikola's arrival this floor was rarely used. She worked her way down the darkened hall, trying every door. When she reached the end of the long passage she heard Will shouting her name at the head of the stairs.

"Will! I need a weapon!" She shouted back and she heard him mumble something to the affirmative before she tried the doors on the other side of the hall. As she returned to the stairs she met Will, coming up them at a hampered pace with a stunner in each hand. Silently she praised the foresight that had led her to put weapons caches on each floor.

"Anything?" Will asked, and Helen shook her head.

"Down the hall. I'll take the East Wing, you take the West."

Will nodded in confirmation and they traversed the North hall together, stunners up.

"Nikola!"

Where the North hall met the East and West wings Helen paused, waiting for an answer. It had only been seconds since she and Will had started this impromptu sweep, only seconds, but they amounted to an eternity in a situation such as this one. The silence following the solitary shot was deafening.

"Advance." Helen said, issuing the command in a softer tone. Will started down the east wing and she the west, checking the doors as she came to them. She'd only traveled halfway when she noticed the puddle of pale yellow light at the end of the hall. The door was open and the light had to be ambient, from the street or one of the security lights on the roof.

"Will…" Helen called, her voice just loud enough to be heard, motioning for him to head back her way before she stepped silently to wall just outside the doorway. She waited there until she felt Will lightly tap his finger tips against her back.

"Nikola?" She spoke to the doorway. She listened closely for any sound of him, ignoring the panic she had started to feel. He was hard to kill, she reminded herself, and not all of that resiliency was due to his vampiristic traits. He was resourceful, he had learned to fight in the past century. He had to be alive.

Crossing to the other side of the door Helen made eye contact with Will. He nodded in return, gun at the ready.

Please, she thought, please don't let this be the way it ends.

She pivoted into the room with the blaster at eye level. It had changed a great deal since the Serbian moved in. The loft was very similar to Henry's lab, a greenhouse like annex where Magnus had entertained the idea of growing orchids. Now every counter was full of equipment. Some of it borrowed or pilfered from her store rooms, most of it hybrid creations that bore Nikola's signature. The lights were off, and one flick of the switch told her that they weren't coming on. Either the bulbs were blown or Nikola had removed them. The inventor himself was nowhere in sight.

The counters were in some disarray, but no more than she was used to seeing, and it didn't appear that there had been an altercation in the room. She saw no immediate signs of blood either. There was an island counter blocking some of the room, and a large cabinet in the corner that helped separate the sleeping quarters from the rest of the room.

Nodding to Will, Helen stepped away from the door, working her way cautiously around the island. The floor was relatively clear of debris. Near the base of the island she discovered two metal cages, the sort that gerbils or lab rats were housed in. They had been knocked to the ground by a violent force; the thin bars crushed inward, the two separate cubes now forever meshed by the violence of what had hit them. There was a hole blown in one cage, a neat round hole that looked very much like the work of a bullet.

Both cages contained the remains of something small and fur bearing. It was too dark to determine what the animals were but Helen knew they were dead.

A long, laden sigh tore her from the sight. She flicked her gaze and the aim of her stunner toward the sound. It wasn't what she had hoped to see, and it wasn't pretty, but she felt some relief, very closely followed by growing anger.

"Nikola…"

"I've failed, Helen. I've failed." Tesla moaned, his face pale and slightly green. His head was propped uncomfortably against the base of a rolling chair that he must have fallen out of. The rest of him was stretched out in a long line on the floor, and he was drunk from head to toe. In one hand he held the remains of a bottle of wine, '87 Lafite she guessed, judging by the shape of the bottle. The other held a pistol. One of her father's dueling pistols by the look of it. The gun only held one shot and the ex-vampire had used that to kill a dead rodent, or perhaps just the cage.

"What the he-" Will's voice came from just inside the door.

Tesla sucked in another tortured breath and weakly lifted the hand holding the pistol, waving it in the general direction of the fallen cages. "I tried…I tried everything. Heat, cold, acids, bases, even electricity."

Helen couldn't be certain that the pistol was empty but she sincerely doubted that Tesla would have had the time to reload, given that the powder horn and lead balls were on the counter several feet away from where he had collapsed.

"Electricity…Helen." Tesla struggled upward for a moment, his eyes focusing on hers before he fell back. "My old friend…"

"Is he drunk!?" Will asked, limping further into the room.

"Failed. It FAILED!" Tesla cried out, gesturing with the empty wine bottle before he tried to drink from it. When he got nothing he frowned at it, disgusted.

Helen was afraid he would throw it, but he merely let it loose from his hand. The bottle tilted and tipped over, rolling away from him.

With one hand now free Tesla made a secondary effort to leave the floor. He long legs bent and he tilted one way, getting them under his weight. He tilted the other way and caught hold of the edge of the island, pressing the muzzle of the pistol into the padded seat of the chair. In this manner he managed to get up right.

When he no longer needed it for a crutch Tesla stared down at the gun in his hand, appearing surprised that he still had it, then tossed it at the counter.

Helen jumped and winced at the clatter it made, knowing the damage that the heavy would do to the wooden countertop. And further, the damage that would be done to the inner workings of the gun itself.

"Are you insane?" Will demanded and Tesla glared at him, pointing a wavering finger at her protégé that never quite remained aimed in the right direction.

"No, Billy." Tesla snapped, heavily accenting the first consonants. "I am a genius, I am an inventor, I am one of the greatest visionaries of all time and I _am_ drunk…but I am not insane."

With a huff the very drunk man finally settled into the rolling chair, graceful even at the height of his intoxication.

Helen hadn't said anything. Frankly she could think of nothing worth saying. Will was reacting the way she should have, with disbelief and shock and a sense of propriety and responsibility. He saw Nikola for the spoiled, petulant and irresponsible child that he was.

Helen saw something far worse. She saw defeat. True, bone deep, beyond depression defeat was buried under the intoxicated slurs and the angry belligerence. It wasn't like Tesla to give up. Tesla hadn't given up in over a century, even after faking his own death and going into hiding, he still went on.

She remembered that night, the Primiere Cru, that moment when her heart swelled and for a brief moment she might have…just might have willingly kissed him out of pure celebration. Watching that tray fly into the air, watching Tesla re-empowered.

She had never before felt pity for him, but under all the theatrics there was a heart breaking stillness that she could not bear to see.

"Helen…" Nikola's eyes slowly rose to meet hers, his irises heavily dilated in his current state. When they met she took in a sharp breath. There it was, there in his eyes. Intense, passionate, animalistic. That which had crept into her heart long ago, and stayed, even in the presence of John, and James, and any other that captured her heart. Under it all was _that_; like Nikola's dormant DNA, waiting to be activated. Waiting to be awakened.

Then it was gone, and Nikola looked away. He swallowed and his hand traveled to his stomach. "…I'm going to be sick." Before she could stop him, or even reach for a receptacle, Nikola had emptied at least one bottle of wine onto the floor. Helen just barely stepped out of the way in time, avoiding getting the mess on her bare feet.

She backed away quickly forcing Will back. She heard the profiler start to gag then head out of the room and looked around for a towel, or a mop. Nikola was still bent over, not at all improved. As she looked around she started to notice the other empty wine bottles.

It makes sense, she thought, picking her way to the closet in the corner and grabbing a handful of linens. He's had an incredible tolerance for alcohol for the past hundred years. He wouldn't know how to stop when the mortal, human body can take no more.

A few of the towels she intended for the mess Nikola had made, but she stopped at the sink first to douse one of them in cool water. As she turned off the tap she heard the squeak of a rat. She froze, listened for a moment, then looked around the back edge of the sink. She'd known there were pests in the attic for some time but she'd never actually caught one of the things scurrying about.

She bent down and searched under the basin, along the line of the wall and behind one of the shelves before she returned to Nikola. He was upright by then, moaning but still conscious. Assuming his intake was directly influenced by the number of empty bottles in the room there was a chance of alcohol poisoning, and at the very least he would have the world's worst hangover come morning. The next few days would not be fun for either of them.

Helen used the wetted towel to wipe down his face before placing it around his neck. He neither thanked her nor protested. It was just as well, she would not have put up with anything from him in that state. When she bent to start cleaning the vile mess on the floor she heard squeaking again, louder and no longer muffled.

She listened, turning her head to try to catch the sound. Even as she did she felt Nikola shift in his chair. She glanced up. He was sitting straighter, his attention drawn to something behind her. She shifted, still on her haunches, and watched his eyes and his face as he stood, entranced with whatever it was he was looking at.

More squeaking filled the air before she heard the distinct, metallic sound of a cage rattling. Something charged through her. Fear, disbelief, wonder. Helen was on her feet in moments, crossing to where the cages lay in tangles, Nikola moving at his own sluggish pace leaning on the counter.

The dark, furry bundle she had seen dead and still moments ago, jerked sharply, rattling the cage again. Only one of the rats was moving and it was clearly trying to escape. Desperately bending back broken bars, or warping whole ones until she could get past the surface damage, Helen dug into its prison.

Nikola stood behind her, silent, watching pale faced as Magnus reached her hand carefully into the wiry, jagged web.

She felt fur and tiny claws and a rapidly beating pulse. She grasped the creature carefully and wound her arm out, closing her other hand over the creature once it was free of the cage. When she stood Nikola took a step closer, staring at her closed hands like a child at Christmas.

"It's alive, Nikola." Helen told him.

The Serbian took in a gasping breath, his fingertips resting lightly against Helen's closed hands. He wasn't trying to touch her, but the creature that she dare not let loose.

"It was dead." He breathed.

"Yes, I know. You shot it."

Nikola blinked at her slowly, his eyes taking longer than normal to focus before he gave a nearly imperceptible shake of the head.

"No…that rat was dead…when I found it."


	7. Part II - Magnus - The Stairs

**Author's Note: This was a challenging chapter to write. Lots of reference to the episode "Trail of Blood" and some of the nuances I noticed in the performances therein.**

* * *

Chapter 7

"What's the matter?"

"Maybe we shouldn't…"

"Oh…I think we should. Get in."

Tesla shook his head, his hands pressed against the wall either side of the opening, preventing Will from pushing him any farther forward.

"You gotta be kidding me…" Will mumbled, looking down the north hall just as Magnus rounded the corner. "It's perfectly safe, Professor. It gets maintained regularly…"

Tesla snapped his bleary gaze towards Will, paling a second later.

"By a guy named Regis." Will finished watching to make sure Nikola wasn't about to puke again.

"Regis?" Nikola asked, narrowing his eyes and swallowing heavily. Helen watched as Will took a step away from the inventor as a preventative measure.

"What's wrong?" She asked.

"He refuses to get into the elevator."

"For heaven's sake, why?"

Tesla bared his teeth in a silent hiss before he pushed away from the elevator all together. He swayed for a moment before he took a step to the side, then another step down the hall. He had made it nearly ten feet before he said, "It's dangerous." His words slurred and echoed in the empty space.

Helen looked to Will, who looked back at her with bloodshot and baggy eyes.

"Is the rat really alive?" He asked.

"Yes." Helen said. "Slightly wounded, but alive."

Down the hall Tesla started humming, the song just barely recognizable as an old hymn from the '20s. Helen groaned softly. "He's singing Negro spirituals now. That's never a good sign."

"He won't get on the elevator."

"Then we'll have to take the stairs."

Moving together Helen and Will tracked the ex-vampire down the hall, each smoothly sliding under an arm and guiding Tesla gradually to and down the stairs.

"I did it, Helen." He said, tightening the arm that was lying across her shoulders. "I created new life."

"You revived it, Nikola. You hardly created it."

"Hardly? Helen the animal was dead. Gone. Nothing but a rotting corpse in the dark recesses of your wine cellar..." His words melted together, the consonants softened by the numbing of his tongue and his mind.

Given how much Nikola had taken from her wine cellar Helen wondered if it could still be called that.

At the base of the stairs they paused, Helen taking a moment to orient herself before she gestured toward the wing containing her bedroom.

"Now it breathes, again, Helen. It lives, it moves, it has purpose..." Nikola tried to gesture grandly with his hands, but he was impeded by the grip each of his guides had on him.

"It's a rat." Will muttered on the other side of Nikola. With a sneer the Serbian removed his arm from the profiler's shoulder and pushed him away with a hand flat against his chest. Tesla and Helen made it to the corner before he stopped walking, forcing Helen to do the same. He turned towards her, pulling his arm free of her grip then steadying himself with his hands on her shoulders.

"Helen…let's celebrate. We'll go out on the town, like the old days. Dance for hours in the moonlight on an open terrace in Rome, or Vienna, or the Riviera…with the beaches…and the sound of the waves…" His voice dropped into a sultry whisper and a slow smirk broke across his face. If he hadn't been so drunk, and so utterly insufferable, Helen might have been tempted to entertain his ideas. But even her imagination rebelled against it.

When she didn't immediately respond, Nikola canted his head to the side, his brows furrowing in confusion. Helen placed her fists on her hips and gave the inventor the sternest and most disapproving look she could manage. Seconds later his hands slipped from her shoulders. He was slowly seeming to realize that she was neither amused, nor in any way interested.

He cleared his throat once and backed up a step. "Well…" He said, trying to casually slip a hand into a pants pocket, but he was unable to find the break in the cloth, mostly because there were no pockets. After a few failed attempts he gave up, rubbing his hands together and wiping the palms on his vest front. He stumbled a few feet down the hall, closely inspecting some of the wainscoting.

Will and Helen watched him as he took a few wobbling steps at a time, not really going anywhere.

Will shook his head, gesturing with an open hand in Nikola's direction, unable to put words together to properly say what he was thinking.

"I know." Helen said, "Every time."

Will let the hand fall to his side. "Are you going to be alright with him?"

Helen smiled softly, then nodded. This situation was far from ordinary or normal, but she could guess where Nikola's mind was.

"I'll look after his..rat."

"A cage in the infirmary should do nicely for now. Get some sleep, Will." Helen said, waiting until she saw Will's eyes relent and the tension in his shoulders ease.

"You too." He said, then turned to limp down the hall.

Helen crossed her arms and turned toward the stubborn, egotistical, obstinate, self-serving, independently minded genius that had plagued her life, mind and heart for over a hundred years. He stood at the end of the hall, stationary now, propped against the wall with one hand while the other traced imaginary calculations on the wallpaper. His mind never stopped, she thought, even hindered as it was.

She padded down the hall toward him, meeting his eyes when he looked away from his invisible formula.

"I see Junior's had enough of the evening."

"He's gone to look after your test subject, you should be grateful."

Nikola sighed, his eyes focused on hers before he looked away. "Yes, I should be." He admitted, turning back to the wall. As he had always been, Nikola was capable of seeing things that no one else could. Solutions to problems that plagued the world were as child's play to him. The problem was the methods he used, underhanded short cuts that almost always got him into trouble.

"What happened Nikola?"

His eyes came back, more guarded than before. She remembered the last time she had seen that look. In the dark of a dripping cavern, under a film of dirt and sweat. After he had been freed from the cocoon, after she had discovered his reason for being there.

Then he snapped free of her gaze and turned away.

There was something about the scientist that she had always understood. Explanations were precious.

As much controversy as there was surrounding his infamous battle with Thomas Edison, the betrayal Tesla had felt after their falling out had scarred him deeply. His devious nature had developed as a result. After Helen's insistence that he fake his own death, essentially to save his life, he became even more reclusive and secretive. Fleshing out a formula, presenting a paper, displaying a design, exposing the brilliant inner workings of his thought process, these were things that Nikola anticipated and delighted in.

In the caves of Columbia, when it seemed that he had betrayed everything she loved and held dear for the sake of reviving his now dormant vampiric traits, Helen could do nothing to stop the emotions overwhelming her, or the words that followed them. She had been angry and still engulfed in the pain of Ashley's passing. It hadn't mattered then that her words might have opened a wound. Even without his immortality Nikola seemed as impenetrable as ever.

She realized now that she had been mistaken.

When Nikola turned away she was struck. He didn't trust her anymore. Perhaps she had berated him one too many times.

She cared for him, yes, she could safely admit that. She worried for his health now that the strength of the source blood no longer coursed through his veins. But something else had been torn from him when his own invention was turned against him, when his 'true nature' as he called it, was destroyed.

How deeply had he been hurt? She never fathomed that the great Nikola Tesla had a breaking point. When he turned away she was hit with the heart stilling realization that he was very close to that point, he was pulling away and he would have no one left to save him if she let him go now.

"Nikola." She said, softly, and she closed the distance to where the Serbian stood. She could see the struggle to regain his defenses. He had finally shown her the pain she had unintentionally caused and he regretted that revelation.

She crossed in front of him, her hands reaching out and clasping one of his. He had done this very same thing to her in the short moment they had alone in Columbia. He didn't pull away, but neither would he look up from the polished wood floor.

She lowered her eyes as well. Looking to the pale smooth hand in hers. She brushed the pad of her thumb across his knuckles and heard him take in a breath. She looked up, expecting to hear his voice. But he said nothing, frozen. Finally he raised crystal blue eyes to hers, offered her a weak smile.

"I .." Something stopped him, something broke his voice. "I just want my life back."

She had heard the words before but they hadn't registered the way they did now.

In Columbia she'd heard a selfish, immature child whining about change. This time she heard the part of Tesla that only surfaced when they were alone. He was afraid. He was an old, old man suddenly expected to learn new tricks. Thrust into a world that might have had room for a brilliant, conducive vampire but wanted nothing to do with a century old inventor who lost the only battle it knew of and died lonely, pathetic and impoverished. Forgotten.

"Well find a way." Helen said, holding tighter to his hand. "I haven't given up on you, Nikola." She said, tugging on his hand until he met her eyes. She couldn't say the other words. She didn't dare change what was between them before she was sure. Before she knew she meant what she was promising.

She watched him struggle with something, doubts and terrors that she knew she never would have seen if he had been sober in that moment.

Finally she felt his hand tighten, squeezing back. He nodded silently, covering her hand with his own before he pulled free.

He started down the east wing, away from her room. She watched him, not sure where he was going until he stopped at the library doors.

He put his hand on the door handle, observed it there then asked, "Rain check?" When he rose his head up she could see some of the life return to him, the beginning of a mischievous smirk.

She couldn't stop the bright smile. Even with his powers gone he was electrifying. She didn't answer, shaking her head as she turned to her bedroom, fighting the smile.

"Some day, Helen…" She heard him say. "Some day."


	8. Part II - Magnus - The Lab

Chapter 8

The cool air smelled of formaldehyde, chlorine and the faint whiff of burned sulfur; all familiar. The hiss of a Bunsen burner, the vibration of a liquid at full boil, the dampened screeches, hisses and whines of the animals being treated and housed in the infirmary, only the thickness of one wall away. Clothed in the habiliments of a new day, skin freshly cleansed, hair pulled back and the stiffness of her lab coat creating friction every time she moved. This was her happy place. This was the part of her life that managed to remain timeless no matter how the world changed around her.

Helen Magnus could lose herself here, it was far too easy. It was part of why she refused to update perfectly adequate equipment. These were her tools, the brushes to her canvas, the chisel to her sculpture. They were fitted to her purposes, her hands, her touch. She would no more buy a new centrifuge than she would a new set of eyes.

Before her she had many different cultures of life and semi-life. Each created from a small sample of blood that she had taken from Tesla's test subject. Each was given a different future, a different environment. Some were collected under a heating lamp, others had been frozen since she began her work.

She had narrowed some of the parameters of her experiments while boiling an early morning pot of tea but not enough to make her work any less than daunting. She wasn't even entirely certain of her goals.

The Serbian had done something to once dead brain, skin and blood cells to reanimate them. He had brought new life to a creature, but that new life was not what he had expected. Until the machine finished mapping the creature's DNA she could only work with its blood, observing the way the cells reacted to varying stimuli.

On the far end of the table, away from the cultures, she had stacks of lab books with Nikola's scratchings in them. Earlier that morning she had gone to get his notes from the loft to save time and avoid pointless avenues, ultimately to discern which combination of events had led to the rat's rebirth. But when she first opened them that morning, sitting in the quiet kitchen at pre-dawn, she had been struck with a curious sense of intimacy. She had seen his work before of course, on chalkboards and computer screens and in his many published papers. But the sketches and plans in the yellowed pages were not meant for public display. It brought into sharp relief once again the realization that so much of Tesla was hidden, sheltered behind the flamboyant dramatist.

She recalled his strained voice again. His hand in hers, his words, "I want my life back."

As director of the Sanctuary Network and as someone responsible for so many lives other than her own Helen could not very well devote her efforts towards potentially creating yet another threat, towards returning Nikola to his former state.

Further, despite his claims that he was useless without his vampirism, Helen had found the scientist far more cooperative and useful in the past few months, than he had ever been before. But as Nikola had once promised, that didn't stop him from trying to take over the world, or trying to regain the worth he perceived to have lost. Until he accepted who he had become, or rather, what he had been returned to, Helen knew she would be picking up the pieces of his dying ego with every failed experiment.

In this case however, he had accomplished something extraordinary.

The rat had not been 'vamped'. It had been wounded and remained so, healing at a perfectly natural rate. When briefly introduced to frightening or threatening stimuli the rat had responded as any rat would. There had been no sign of the shifting Nikola had once been capable of. Her extraordinary discovery had occurred when she went to feed the animal. It had reacted toward her with an intelligence far above what she expected from a common rat.

When she went to open the cage the rat immediately took notice and watched her from the back corner of its prison. It observed the door, that it was open, and that she was not blocking it, then bypassed the container of food altogether and shot toward the door in an attempt to escape.

After taking the samples she would need for the day's work, she placed the animal in an enclosure they had once designed for a colony of tiny, humanoid abnormals. The miniature town of simple homes and streets and buildings had been built by the humanoids themselves for the most part with some of the structures provided by Henry, who knew of a hobby shop in Old City that didn't ask questions.

Magnus placed several different sources of food and water in various parts of the town, allowing the rat to observe her but keeping it contained for the time being. When she was finished she released the animal and with a pad of paper and timer in hand she quickly jotted down notes, following the rat's progress.

At first it seemed wary of her, unwilling to move out into the greater part of the lay out until it had determined the reason for her interest. When the test subject finally made the decision to venture outward it followed the exact same path she had first taken, found a stash of treats and consumed them before moving on.

In ten minutes the rat had navigated the entire room, discovered most of the food and water stashes and begun making a nest for itself, apparently contented with its new living environment.

Helen was stunned. She scribbled for forty minutes until she was satisfied with the accuracy of her observations. Her next step would be an MRI which would require sedating the animal, something she wasn't willing to do until she knew just what exactly Nikola had done to the animal. That would have to wait until the DNA mapping was finished.

In the interim hours she had returned to the work of creating and analyzing blood cultures, settling into a steady rhythm as she tested and observed each petri dish under the microscope.

Helen's whole body jolted at the sudden sound of a voice calling her name through the intercom. It wasn't loud, but in the silent intensity of her work it was like a bull horn.

She heard a masculine giggle filter through the speakers in the corner of the lab and glared up at the video camera hanging in the corner.

"Good morning, Will." She sighed, only very slightly annoyed. His stunt had almost cost her an hour of work.

"Afternoon actually…"

"What?" Helen looked to the clock on the wall for a long moment before she realized that the second hand was no longer moving. The clock had frozen at ten a.m. "Bloody batteries." She muttered, and then felt her stomach roll over. At least her body knew the time even if her mind was lost.

"There's a Private Investigator at the front gate. He says he's working on a missing person case, and uh…I think we might know the person he's looking for."

Helen felt her stomach shift again, and this time it wasn't for lack of food. This feeling was different, and it made her fingernails curl.

"His cred's look legit and he's working for some very powerful people."

"Show him to my office, Will. The usual precautions."

"Right."

"And Will.." Helen sighed as she stored the active cultures she was working with. She pulled off her lab coat and hung it on the hook near the door. "Find Nikola."

Once she left the lab and started up the stairs to the main floor Helen felt like she was traveling through time. She had been expecting early morning light, filtering through the eastern windows, but was walking through pools of light coming from the west. Daylight savings time also meant that the hour was earlier than it had been a few weeks ago, but the sun didn't care for man's telling of time, and touted it, announcing that it was late afternoon despite the tolling of only three bells.

Helen arrived in her office just as the mantel clock finished its song. There was a man in her office, helping himself to her decanter of alcohol.

Five foot two, but athletic, the way Will was built. Long, light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, the strands wiry and wavy. He wore glasses over startling brown eyes, a white shirt and brown slacks under a brown jacket, no tie, and despite his self-invitation to her liquor, he offered a courteous and professional hand shake when she entered.

"Walter Mastiff, PI." He said, his grip strong enough to promise that he worked out, but soft enough to suggest that it wasn't often.

"Mr. Mastiff. I'm Helen Magnus, I run this facility." She said, wariness lightly hidden in her voice behind the standard greeting that she reserved for all strangers to the Sanctuary.

At the word 'facility' Mastiff had a brow up, but he made no comment, sitting agreeably in the chair that Magnus gestured to. The same one Nikola had been pouting in not twenty-four hours ago. She noticed, vaguely that it had been cleaned since then.

"I'm sure your employee let you in on what I'm doin' here." Mastiff leaned forward in his chair reaching towards a brown leather doctor's bag on the floor and popping it open with the flick of a wrist. His other hand still held the snifter he'd been mooching from until he found that he couldn't pull files from the bag with one hand. He was forced to put the snifter on the edge of Magnus' desk, which he did with a little too much force.

Magnus eyed the spot of brandy now soaking into her treated leather desk top until it was covered by a stack of file folders.

"I'm after a young man that was reported missing about seven months ago. I was hired a month after his disappearance by the young man's father and have been, since then, following the strangest and most fascinating trail you could imagine."

The PI shifted through a pile of information, some of the pages were still stiff and crisp as if they had just been printed. Others had been wadded or stained by the bottom of a coffee mug or dripped on by a careless hand holding a sandwich or a soup bowl. In fact the longer she watched him, the more stains and imperfections she could see on his attire as well. The only saving grace was that he didn't smell.

"Here are the documents that Mr. O'Connor signed when he institutionalized his son in Mexico for a period of time that was determined by Mr. O'Connor. He felt that said institution would be the best place for his child while he attended to business."

"Child? Forgive me, Mr. Mastiff-"

"Uh…Walter, please."

"Mr. Mastiff, we have no children here."

There was a long pause. Walter reacted first to the repetition of his last name, then to her question, working out where the conversation had gone awry and finally nodding. "Right…figure of speech. The body of an adult, the mind of a child. My mistake. As I was saying…"

A handful of Xeroxed documents were thrust in front of Helen and she finally sat at her desk, finding her reading glasses and putting them on.

Forms, written on by an adult's hand in black ink, full of official language that belonged only in the medical world. Resident, physician, diagnosis, treatment plan, behavioral analysis. She glanced over it quickly forming a vague picture of the man that had hired Mastiff, and a clearer, more established picture of the child that he had left in the care of a nameless treatment facility south of the border. A facility headed by a German medical doctor with fake credentials and a fake accent.

Oh, Nikola, she thought. Again.

"These documents show you when and where the MP, that's missing person, was last seen by his father, after which time Mr. O'Connel attended to various business ventures, expecting to return in one month's time to retrieve the MP." Mastiff paused long enough to force Helen to look up from her reading.

"And?"

"It didn't happen." He said, then reached for the files again, upsetting them and knocking the corner of a folder against his glass, spilling more of the liquid, this time onto his collection of paper work. He didn't notice, flipping through his notes until he came to the next item.

"I inspected the facility myself less than a week after my hire. These photographs were taken at that time. As you can see the building appears to have been abandoned. Empty offices, examination rooms, patient rooms… Everything had been torn up by vagrants and what little documentation I could find was picked through and incomplete. I did however find partial files for the following….persons…" Familiar names and faces were laid before Magnus and she was careful not to react to them. She didn't know where it was all going. She didn't know how much this Mastiff knew, what he was really after or if he even was who he said he was.

Mastiff waited, she continued to say nothing, so he cleared his throat and dug into the piles. Before he could do anymore damage with the snifter Helen darted a hand forward and moved it away from the file folders, setting it on her side of the desk.

"I tracked down each of them and found that they were, much like my MP, the children of wealthy tycoons of the business world. They had been sent to the facility for treatment, however these patients were supposedly part of a drug addiction rehabilitation program, and were not there for attendant care as was my client's child."

Attendant care? Helen narrowed her eyes, drawing in a breath. Something had ignited and fired in the back of her mind, a dormant synapse that was awakened by those two words. Something Nikola had said, while sitting in that very chair.

"This is where it gets a little…" Walter sat for a moment, searching for the right word, appearing very reluctant to say it before he blurted, "…creepy. You see there were some death reports attached to those names, and then…a few months later I received word from contacts that the death reports were false. And uh…that's when Old City started coming up. Everything seemed to tie in to this part of the country…" He was starting to build up to the good part, starting to take pride in his investigative accomplishments. Helen could feel it in the way his upper arm muscles tensed, his fingers crinkling the paper in his hands.

"So I moved my investigation here and went door to door…" Mastiff paused for effect then reached into the middle of a file and pulled out a color print out. It was from a high quality security camera, a still taken from digital footage. There was some blurring and the photo had been blown up a few times. But the face was familiar.

Red hair, slightly bookish demeanor. Standing at an ATM, fingers to the number pad. Jeff O'Donnel.

Helen wasn't able to stop the tiny gasp of surprise, or keep her mouth from opening in shock.

"Found my MP." Mastiff said, triumphantly.

Footsteps pounded down the hall and Helen knew the words were coming even before they left Henry's mouth.

"Tesla's gone." He said, barely acknowledging that Helen wasn't alone in the room. She tried to flash him a warning with her eyes, not to say it, but he had caught it too late.

Mastiff had turned in his seat to observe the newcomer, and he went between Helen's face and Henry's, confused for a moment before he asked, "Tesla? Like as in the scientist?"


	9. Part III - Nikola - The Sewer

Chapter 9

"Hey! Hey guy! I thought you said you were going to explain some things..."

Nikola groaned at the sound of the voice and ignored it. He slogged forward through the cold muck that he could feel already leeching into his shoes. It was degrading, being forced to leave the Sanctuary in this manner instead of through the front door. He'd been working on convincing himself that it was worthwhile. That it was all in the name of science.

"You still haven't bothered to tell me why we're in the sewers."

He had a headache. It had been pounding away from the moment he woke in the library at sunrise. He'd fallen asleep on the window seat, a stack of books at his feet, one open in front of him.

A long night of research had gotten him next to nowhere. He still couldn't track down that one illusive answer. He still had a problem that he, Nikola Tesla, once boy genius, once heir to the greatest race of all time, now-

"This is insane, Dude."

Nikola took in a sharp breath, careful to draw it in through his mouth where the smell would have less impact. He moved to spin on a heel, wishing he still had the were-withal to vamp and scare the petulance out of the boy. But before he could say a word Nikola felt his foot slip. He knew an instant of terror as his arms wind-milled, the knuckles of his right hand scraping against stone wall that might have saved him if it had a higher metal content. He tried to thrust a foot back in that millisecond, and force his shoulders forward to compensate for the direction he was heading.

The movement pitched him to his right and his head jarred against the wall, making the headache and subsequent nausea even worse. Involuntarily he reacted to the pain, jerked to his left and spun, splattering into the mud. Only it wasn't just mud. There were other, far more horrible things collected in the sludge.

Tesla's face paled, his features stilled while he desperately reeled in the panic desiring to unfurl. It wouldn't do to panic, not under the watchful eyes of the ginger. Up unto that moment Nikola had managed to keep his palms clear of the mess but he would need to dirty them now if he were to rise. Gritting his teeth and steeling his stomach he let his hands and fingers ooze down into the cold wetness, found a solid surface and pushed upwards. His vest and jacket were soaked through and dripping, some of the muck was on his face, and soaked into his pants and covering his shoes. No doubt there was plenty of it in his hair.

Somehow his hands were the greatest irritation. They were slimy now and he had no clean piece of clothing to wipe them on.

He made it upright, slipping only once more on the slick at his feet, and jerked his jacket, pulling it tight across his shoulders, the only reassuring gesture he could manage. He turned stiffly to face the mouthy ginger, swearing to himself that if there was even the slightest hint of humor on the boy's face, vampire or no, Nikola would beat the whelp.

"You don't do well in sewers..." Jeff said.

Nikola favored him with the tiniest of twinges at the corner of his mouth, then returned to his scowl and put a hand to the damp stone wall as he turned, more cautious now, continuing down the passage. His first step told him that he had done minor harm to his ankle as well, but he was blessed with a scant two minutes of silence during which time he could clearly hear Jeff's careful steps behind him.

Tesla counted, it was what he always did in the silence. He counted until he had covered the ground he'd already covered a day before. He could feel the EM shield above him pulsing, stronger and stronger, as they drew closer and closer to the outer edge of Sanctuary property. Beyond the EM field, beyond the view of the security cameras, out of reach of Helen's world.

He'd been feeling twinges of guilt, buried under the feeling of abandoning something warm and wonderful that he always wanted but could never have. But he was serving his first mistress, the Lady of Science, and no matter his love for Helen, science came first.

"You know I've figured out some things." Jeff said and Nikola spared a brief glance behind him, just to make sure Mr. O'Donnel was still moving and hadn't decided that his revelation required that he be stationary.

"I know that you aren't actually a doctor. At least not a medical doctor. Miss Magnus said that you were Nikola Tesla. I looked him up in some of the books in that library. And you can't be him because he died in 1943. And you know she also said that you were a vampire."

Nikola gave a sarcastic laugh and turned his head to the side to toss a caustic, "Ha!" over his shoulder. He heard Jeff stop behind him and ignored it. Let the boy be confused, Tesla didn't care to discuss the sad reality of his current state of being.

"So what are you then, other than a freak that watches people sleep then steals their blood."

That forced Nikola to a halt. Keeping one hand on the wall he turned halfway around so that his words to the 20-something would have better impact.

"I am, and have been, far more than you could ever possibly conceive. I have seen and created more wonders of science, more innovations of genius than the Tesla in your history books and much to my chagrin you are one of those innovations."

Jeff closed one eye and half closed another, his lips working on something soundlessly. Nikola wasn't sure if it was a wink or perhaps the beginnings of an aneurysm. He didn't care to wait and find out so he turned and continued limping down the tunnel.

He allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction when he heard Jeff moving after him.

"That's really your name then? I mean…who you are? What…were you named after the Tesla guy? I mean you do kinda look like him. You don't have the mustache but…"

They had passed beyond the EM shield and ahead Nikola could see the faint filtering of light that might indicate access to the streets above. A good egress point, especially given how painful his ankle had become.

"Nah, that's crazy. Nobody lives that long. And nobody lives that long and looks only what…forty, forty-five."

The markings on the stone walls were faded but Nikola could still read them. They indicated the access hatch above, and that the tunnel continued for about seventy feet before another access hatch could be reached. The more distance from the Sanctuary, he thought, the harder it would be for that blasted detective to track them down. And did he look forty? He had been a mere 32 when the source blood gave him new life. De-vamping had cost him years, given him silver hair and age lines.

"I guess you could be his grand kid, or great grand kid. But you know I don't think Tesla ever married. He kinda died a sad, lonely old codger. He was like…in love with bats or something."

Sixty feet, fifty-five, fifty…

"That'd be a funny coincidence. Like if Tesla was a vampire and he was in love with bats. He could do that transforming thing and then he and the bats could make a little nest. Make more…little bats. Batlings."

He was growling now with every step. A low, quiet sound while he forced himself to count. Thirty-five, twenty-five. There was more daylight ahead and another slightly rusty ladder. It looked strong enough for his own weight, and surely it would hold Jeff.

"Hey did you know that Bram Stoker's birthday, he's the guy who wrote Dracula, was like…yesterday."

Standing under the ladder, staring up at the manhole cover, Nikola had had enough. It was time to shut up the experiment gone wrong, it was time to redeem the mockery of his race that had been going on for far too long. The sound of the alcoholic hack's name was the final straw. Nikola growled and forced as much polarized magnetism upward towards the manhole cover as he could manage. As it happened, that was a whole hell of a lot.

Like a cannonball out of an over loaded canon the heavy metal disc shot straight up into the air, upsetting the back tire of a passing bus before it soared for three stories, twisting fast enough to create an audible hum. When it started its descent Nikola closed his eyes and manipulated the structure of the cover, his influence causing it to heat up and glow a hot red, sparks and flames flying from it as friction and oxygen mixed. Nikola took several large steps back out of the light streaming into the sewers, seconds before a heavy mass fell through the manhole, punching hard into the mud and water and drilling several inches into the poured concrete , rebar and stone.

Tesla watched with satisfaction as Jeff was splattered this time, standing frozen in shock, his mouth finally stilled. Following the wave of muck was a veil of hissing steam as the overheated metal ball was forced to cool rapidly. The sludge settled back, some of it filling the new hole while the rest gathered around it. Jeff was staring down at the new sink hole, stunned.

Nikola sighed in satisfaction, tilted his head to the side to crack his neck, and casually sauntered back toward the ginger. "What was it you were saying…about bats?" He asked, teeth showing through the beginnings of a snarky grin.

He got what he wanted, a look of mild fear and quiet respect. It bolstered his waning confidence and reminded him of who and what he was dealing with. What Jeff didn't know at the moment was something Tesla had been considering all along, underneath the irritation. Who Jeff had become, truly was something of a miracle. Especially given that Nikola still couldn't explain it. It would be fun letting him in on the secret, convincing him of the incredible transformation that had taken place.

But first, they had to disappear, as quickly and completely as possible. "Come on." Nikola said, waiting until he saw agreement in Jeff's eyes before he turned to the ladder and concentrated on climbing it without taking it with him.

After a few moments Jeff followed, silent as the dead.


	10. Part III - Nikola - The Streets

For any of you waiting for the next chapter I apologize for the delay and I always appreciate the encouragement of reviews. However real life got in the way of this one. I humbly dedicate this chapter to the memory of a coworker who passed away this morning.

* * *

Chapter 10

"Oh God you stink!"

"What are you covered in? Jesus, I hate when the homeless people get on."

"Hey, I'm going to move to the next car. Come on, guys."

This chorus of complaint was followed by a groan to his left that drew his attention thanks to its intensity. It came from a college aged student that was unable to hear the commentary due to headphones, or see past the smell, and notice the incongruence of an otherwise well groomed man in suit and vest, covered in muck that even a homeless person wouldn't put up with.

Behind him Nikola could hear even Jeff shifting nervously.

It didn't bother Tesla much. Worse things had been said about him, and this discomfort was temporary.

"I told you we should have taken a taxi." Jeff said, leaning toward Nikola's ear.

The scientist turned his head far enough to see out the window and shook his head. He knew no taxi would have taken them, and the bus they had tried to board was filled with a collection of equally displeased people, chief of whom was the driver who promptly threw them off. Walking was out of the question. Too slow, especially given the state of Nikola's injury. The subway was the only way.

"Where are we going anyway?" Jeff groused.

"Some place safe."

"Safe? As in…_saf-er_ than the place where I was previously?" Jeff asked in a harsh whisper. "When did a place called the 'Sanctuary' stop being safe?"

"When a private detective by the name of Mastiff waltzed in under the watchful eye of the ever trusting protégé and-"

"Protégé-?"

"The blonde with mile high hair, you may remember him from the bus two days ago."

"Oh…uh…Will. I think that-"

"He saw fit to allow the weasel faced busy body into Helen's office and has no doubt already been dispatched to the room you were occupying so that they can surrender you into Mastiff's custody."

"Surrender? What-"

"I couldn't let that happen. I won't let that happen. Mastiff is a pawn, more than likely working for the Cabal, as was your father." Tesla did his best not to smell himself as he took in a deep breath. "I'd had suspicions from the moment you were released into my care that there was something else going on in the area. I purposefully chose that cove for its anonymity, and the added attraction for my clientele. The peace and quiet to do my work." He shook his head, lost in his own world. "I should have known that you were the sign of the end, I should have seen it. But everything was going so well."

Three more passengers had vacated their direct vicinity, choosing to sit at the end of the car rather than near the ex-vampire and his slime covered tag-along. In fact the car had emptied so quickly that it took mere seconds at the next stop for Nikola and Jeff to step out onto the platform, instead of being forced to wait for the other passengers to empty out.

Nikola glanced to the sign posted on one of the support beams to verify the name of the street then limped stiffly toward the stairs.

"My father is a train conductor in Cleveland, Ohio. If it weren't for his health insurance I never would have been able to go to that drug clinic. He has nothing to do with anything called the…Cabal…and he certainly wouldn't be able afford a private detective. And why would he hire one anyway?" Jeff's voice was a steady whine behind him, echoing at first as they climbed past the concrete, then dimming in the noise of the street above.

At street level Nikola shook his head looking around, trying to orient himself, trying to remember. "Given my inexperience with the method I'm shocked that my cover story worked so well. In fact it would seem that your clever brain has helped you reconcile the inconsistencies by creating new memories, if false ones."

He found a landmark in a clock tower a block away then looked to where the sun was, hidden behind heavy cloud cover that suggested the beginnings a fall storm.

"You know, the hypnotism was more effective than I thought it would be." He continued, sounding mildly pleased. "It's hard to imagine that I got the idea from the internet." Tesla gave the silent Jeff a baffled shake of the head then started north. Two-oh-seven or two-oh-eight, he couldn't remember the exact building number but he would know it when he saw it.

A little further up the street he checked behind him to make sure the experiment was following and was disappointed to find him still rooted to the spot. Mr. O'Donnel was looking toward the street full of traffic, dumbfounded. Nikola groaned, it was like looking after a toddler who had just learned how to say, "No."

Of course Tesla saw and recognized the black SUV long before Jeff did. Nikola started to run as the vehicle swerved in toward the curb coming to a screeching halt in front of the ginger. O'Donnel had the good sense to be alarmed at that point, but not enough to run away.

The Serbian knew he didn't have the speed to get to his experiment in time, even as he watched two men spill out of back door, grab and sedate Jeff, and drag him into the vehicle. It was all so smooth, so well executed, taking only seconds, there was no question who they were. Abruptly, Tesla changed tactics and ran into the street directly in front of the SUV as it was pulling back into traffic.

It swerved around him and into the path of a taxi, slowing slightly as the driver attempted to navigate around Tesla, moving traffic and a slew of pedestrians crossing the street ahead at the cross walk. Tesla used the distraction to jump onto the side board, wrapped one hand around the runner on the roof of the vehicle and jerked open the back passenger door with the other.

It opened of course, it was against human tendency to immediately lock a closed door, but even if they had managed to lock it, Tesla's magnetic abilities would have destroyed the lock. Not only had he opened the door, but he had torn it off its very hinges. He flung the heavy door away from the vehicle, concentrating on it long enough to make sure it landed harmlessly against the side of a parked car before he refocused on clinging to the SUV as it finally weaved through the obstacles and picked up speed.

The driver tried swerving back and forth as soon as he realized he had an additional passenger. Tesla put both hands on the roof rack and hung tight, calculating the centrifugal forces at work and timing the swerves of the vehicle until the momentum allowed him to swing out, around and over, landing with a painful thud on the roof. He flung his left hand out while he tried to draw breath into temporarily breathless lungs, scrabbling for a handhold on the other half of the roof rack.

Seconds after Nikola's hand contacted metal and rubberized paint the driver slammed on his brakes to avoid a single-file troop of elementary aged children in the crosswalk. The slick mud covering Nikola's vest front reduced the friction between himself and the roof top to nothing and he shot forward. His rapid introduction to the painted crosswalk was stopped only by his grip on the roof rack and a scant mental cry for help that was answered by the steel in the car's frame.

His shoulders screamed in pain, his suit gave up the ghost and tore at the shoulder seams, the tires slid and the children and their caretaker screamed and scattered out of the way. The driver swung the car back toward the road and hit the gas again and Tesla grit his teeth, released one of his grips on the roof rack and thrust his right hand out toward the front of the vehicle.

The hood of the SUV trembled at first, denying the force pulling it upward for a frustrating moment before the latch snapped and the thin shield of metal flew toward the windscreen. The driver panicked again, twisting the wheel, slamming on the brakes. The vehicle started to fishtail wildly, sideswiping a limousine, then careening the other way toward a delivery box truck.

The men inside were panicking audibly until one of them apparently pulled a weapon. As the driver managed to bring the vehicle to a stop at the curb three holes punched up out of the roof. Holes made by bullets.

Bullets, Nikola reminded himself that were now quite capable of causing even more pain and death.

From the driver's seat he heard a male voice shout, "Don't shoot him, you idiot!"

"He's trying to kill us!" Another voice shouted and more bullets exploded through the roof forcing Nikola to scramble backward. He slid down the back of the vehicle, landing on his tailbone on the asphalt as the back window shattered and exploded, pelting him with a shower of safety glass. From the feel of the cuts that opened on his neck and face there was nothing safe about it.

The engine of the SUV whined, the tires groaning. The vehicle was stuck on something that prevented it from escape but it wouldn't be for long. Moving painfully to his haunches Nikola put his hand on the back hatch and pulled. He was tiring, he could feel his control slipping when he was able to defeat the lock but not the hinges. The back door rose, the hydraulics hissing, the sound drawing the driver's attention. He turned to stare back in shock at the bloodied and now enraged ex-vampire slowly rising to his feet. One of the men in the back seat was handling the semi-conscious experiment while the other turned with gun in hand, pointing it at Nikola's left eye.

The Serbian had never really known fear until that moment. He saw something very close to the end of his exceptionally long life passing before his eyes as the barrel leveled and gaped before him, growing impossibly in caliber until he was convinced it was a canon about to blow his head clean off. Worse still, for a split second, he found he could do nothing about it. Every ability, every book, every invention, every ounce of super intelligence did him no good what-so-ever in the face of a gun four feet away.

The Cabal agent behind it pulled the trigger. Nikola heard the report and closed his eyes, his whole body jerking involuntarily. Then he heard more glass shattering and waited for the pain to come, or for the harsh impact of the ground racing up to meet him.

None did and he snapped his eyes open in shock. The experiment was awake and the armed Cabal agent was gone. Nikola blinked and tilted one way surprised as hell to find the agent on his back on the ground, apparently having been kicked out of the open side door of the SUV. The bullet he had fired had punched a hole in the window behind the experiment's head, the same experiment who was now using his head to render unconscious the second Cabal agent in the back seat.

Nikola felt relief and adrenaline flood his core and rounded the vehicle, jerked open the driver's side door and planted as firm a fist as he could manage into the face of the driver. Knuckle met bone, and something crunched. There was more pain, the curse of mortality, but the driver was stunned enough to be escorted from the vehicle into a harmless pile on the sidewalk. Nikola jumped behind the wheel, ignoring the grunts and cries of battle from the back seat, and concentrated on remembering the ten minute driving lesson the hairy one had tried to give him.

Thank God the SUV had an automatic transmission.

The gear shift was already in reverse and Nikola punched the brake, and then the gas, once the first pedal proved fruitless. The engine raced, the back tires squealed then found purchase and he backed the vehicle into another one. Following the crunch of impact Nikola thought he might have heard a human grunt of pain on its way out of the car, but didn't dare look back. He managed to depress the right sequence of levers to get the vehicle to go forward, cranked the wheel and just missed being joined forever with a garbage truck before he swung into the stream of traffic.

Only when he had passed through two lights and pulled down a narrow alley did he dare turn around to see who had survived the fight.

Through a haze of exhaustion, oxygen deprivation and pain he was delighted to see the dazed red head staring back at him, looking nauseated but very much alive. With an adrenaline pumped, joy filled shout Nikola gleefully punched the ceiling of the SUV with his fist, then jerked the appendage back to his chest as the previously bruised knuckle on that hand dislocated itself.

His face blanched a bit in the mirror and he silently reminded himself that he was, in essence, a sesquicentenarian and should no longer be given to such childish and base actions. Behind him he heard the sickening sounds of the redhead losing his lunch.

What he wouldn't give for a glass of red, Nikola thought. Or a bath. Anything but the feeling of panic that was waiting just outside the rapid beat of his heart.

"Let me guess…those guys were with the Cabat…"

"Cabal…" Nikola corrected, sounding almost kind due to the weariness in his voice.

"Uh huh…and you were gonna tell me why at some point, right?"

"Oh…sure." Nikola muttered, still a little out of breath.

"You were also gonna explain how you turned a manhole cover into a ball of flames, and how you…ripped doors off of cars."

Nikola turned slowly in the seat, wincing at the twinges that visited every muscle in his body. "Yeah.." He said nodding, his eyes flickering through the open back hatch and checking that their back trail was still clear. "You know, after we've managed to evade capture."

Jeff nodded in his periphery, turning his head to the right to look out the back, then to the left to focus a confused look on Tesla.

"Why are we still here?"

Tesla felt a flush of embarrassment and dare he say it, humility, and looked away from the experiment's gaze. He grit his teeth, grinding his molars indecisively before he quietly admitted, "I can't drive."

After his initial laughter subsided, Jeff got behind the wheel.


	11. Part III - Nikola - The Tower

Chapter 11

"I thought you said this would only take a few minutes."

Nikola sent a testy glance towards the ginger then looked up at the giant tower of aluminum and copper. "It takes only minutes to send. Receiving on the other hand…"

Perched on the brick and concrete parapet between the old and new sections of the building's roof, Jeff crossed his arms against the cold of the driving wind looking entirely unimpressed.

"They have to notice the message before they can receive it." Tesla snapped. As much as he regretted the increase in smell the cold forced him to draw his jacket closer to his aching torso. As if the pain of humanity wasn't bad enough it turned out that adding cold to the mix made things hurt worse.

"So you invented this thing?" Jeff asked, pointing up at the tower, raising his voice to get over the wind whistling through the forty foot structure.

"I invented the device," Nikola shook his head, concentrating on the magnetic pulses and switching hands in one of the gaps, tucking the now cold hand into a pocket while the previously warmed one picked up the beat. "This eyesore was not my idea. My tower was aesthetically magnificent in every way."

Jeff gave him a distracted nod of the head and looked away cutting short the history lesson Nikola had been prepared to launch into. It didn't matter, he decided. The more he lived in his own failed past these days the more depressed he became. The process of sinking into deeply depressing memories at the same time that he was putting himself through hell so that he could live and suffer longer seemed ironically at odds with one another.

"I understand why we had to come up here instead of finding a hotel somewhere…with showers, and a phone." Jeff remained where he was seated, starting to fidget a little. Nikola thought it was a good sign given the strength of the tranquilizers the Cabal had pumped into his system. "But why do _I_ have to stay out here?"

Nikola shook his head and didn't answer. He closed his eyes and tried to shut out the pain and the cold and the pesky human emotions that were draining him. He pointed every molecule of his exceptional make up toward the tower, investing it all in the message he was sending, telling the machine on the other end to make noise, to rattle and shake and draw her attention. Bring her here.

"I mean, I could wait down in that stairwell." Jeff nodded to the left of where Nikola and the tower stood. "You know how quickly the human body's temperature falls when you're wet? And those storm clouds aren't going to drop Skittles on us."

The message itself was simple. Four numbers indicating where Nikola and the experiment were. It was vague yes but with thought Helen would undoubtedly understand. Hopefully she would put together the place, the method of transmission, the fact that he was contacting her at all and come, as secretly as possible, with all haste. He'd given up on asking for anything else, or finding warmth, food, shower or any other creature comfort on the drive over.

What mattered was getting Helen away from the nosey parker and the distraction that he was clearly intended to be. The inventor had a plan, or the beginnings of one, that would come to magnificent completion all the faster with her assistance.

There was a soft rumble of thunder in the distance, masked only slightly by the wind.

"Of course when the thunder and lightning startup it won't matter how wet we are." Jeff added rising stiffly to his feet and taking careful steps away from the tower and toward the stairwell that would lead down to a set of closed metal doors and into the building.

"Yes well the last time I let you out of my sight I believe you were promptly drugged, abducted and more than likely would have ended up a nameless corpse in a mass grave so…" Tesla spared a finger on his warmed hand, anxiously pointing the experiment away from the door he was headed to and back to where he'd been seated, but the ginger didn't respond.

For a long moment Tesla was forced to divide his attention between the tower and O'Donnel. He could see the gears starting to turn behind the young man's eyes and it made something twist in his stomach in a sickening way. He was too tired to guess what he was thinking and the signal Tesla was sending was dying ever so slightly every moment he sent it. It was Columbia all over again.

To his relief Jeff finally switched directions, taking one step away from the stair well. But it was only one step, and the whelp brought his feet together, standing stock still in the wind.

"Okay." He said, "What happened in Mexico?"

Tesla creased a brow, lost his grip on the magnetic properties he was manipulating for a moment, then hissed, releasing the tower then grasping it again renewing his efforts. "Not now." He growled over his shoulder.

"Fine." Jeff said and turned, taking rapid steps towards the stairs, moving far faster than Nikola liked. He had the doors open before Tesla released the tower, planning to use his abilities to hold the doors closed. But he was so tired that he barely managed to force the doors shut again before a wave of nausea hit him.

"Alright…" He called, leaning hard against the tower. He gulped down air even as he felt the winds shift and the first patter of rain drops splash against his aching head.

He was a clever whelp. Nikola blamed himself for that. And he strongly suspected that Helen had at some point taught the ginger how to be manipulative.

Jeff let go of the door's handle, waiting.

"You were changed. A lot of people were. That's what happened." Nikola put a shaking and pale hand on the tower and felt a slight charge bounce back. If nothing else the whelp was right about the storm. Electricity would be the end of him…in a sad, horrifyingly ironic way.

"Okay. Changed how?"

Nikola sighed heavily. He was too tired for this. Too worn. Too hungry, and sober, frankly to put up with this. But the moment he didn't respond he heard the doors creak and turned his head to watch Jeff duck into the building.

"Do you know what autism is?" Nikola called, turning his back to the tower entirely. He leaned back against it, one hand on it at all times. Lightning be damned. If his old friend, despite its betrayal, chose to take his life then he would go, willingly.

After a moment of listening to the wind and the sprinkling rain and the distant thunder Tesla heard the door close, he heard the light scrape of tennis shoes on safety tread and Jeff came to a halt at the top of the stairs, waiting.

"It's a disorder that affects the brain early in childhood development. The spectrum is so wide and the community so large, researchers cannot hope to compete with it. More often than not children diagnosed with the disorder are either medicated or abandoned, and a very lucky few with caring parents or guardians are able to live out parts of their lives with relative success and happiness but…the damage has already been done."

Jeff was more focused on him now. Nikola could see that he had the experiment's attention but he also knew he hadn't touched the heart of the matter. Jeff didn't understand, not at all yet. The Serbian took a deep breath and it shook on the way out. His hands were quaking behind his back where they rested against the tower struts. He had to make a decision, between dredging up the painful past or sending out a lifesaving message.

No, he thought, the real choice was between forfeiting his work and Jeff's life because he let go of a signal, or because he let go of another human being.

For his Lady Science, this time, the choice was clear.

He stepped away from the tower as he spoke.

"Jeff, you were born with that disorder. Your father, a very wealthy, very cruel and cold man raised you by placing you in facility after facility around the world, while he conducted his business."

Tesla didn't know what part of the father refused to let the boy die when he was young. A glance through Jeff's dense medical history had told Tesla that as an infant he had spent the majority of the beginning of his life on respirators and heart monitors and feeding tubes, and that the autism hadn't been the only problem plaguing the red head.

It would have taken only the flick of a wrist, a single signature on the page to force the hospital to release the infant into his father's care. He would have died and Jeff's father would have been free to continue his life without the strain of the child.

Humanity was the most inexplicable, ever changing, self-contradicting force in the world. But whatever had caused Jeff's father to keep the boy alive, if separate from his life, had provided Tesla with a unique opportunity.

"When you arrived at my clinic in Mexico, you weren't a drug addict from Ohio. Your father saw my clinic as another care home, and I was meant to be your baby sitter."

Jeff hadn't moved. Every muscle in his body was tight and hardened and Nikola could see that he had penetrated the disbelief he'd been battling the past few hours. The Serbian didn't know where to go from there, what he needed to explain or what Jeff was already figuring out on his own. He waited as the storm brewed above them, lightning flashing cloud to cloud above the city, the thunder not far behind.

"I tried calling my father when I got back from the clinic." Jeff said. "I knew the number, the same number I've always known…but I couldn't get a hold of him. I found his name in a Cleveland phone book and I called and…the man who answered didn't know me. I thought…I thought there had to be two Jerry O'Donnel's…"

Tesla nodded. "You were something of a savant when you were placed in my care. Even then you had quite the imagination; I'm not surprised that your mind filled in the gaps."

"You said before something about…hypnotism-"

"Yes." Nikola nodded. "Yes it was the only way I could restore some of the discord. You see when you received the treatment you responded so differently from the others. I abandoned my original course entirely. You…" Nikola smiled softly, feeling something very close to joy exploding in his depressed heart. He remembered the rare hours, the spare moments he was able to take away from the rest of his work in Mexico. He remembered feeling as though he were a young man again, when he was first introduced to the vixen, his Lady Science. "You provided quite the challenge."

It had in fact been a riot keeping up with Jeff. Even before Tesla's modified DNA treatments were administered Jeff had been energetic. Where his social and verbal skills failed his technical abilities flourished. Nikola's decision to include him as part of the experiments he conducted was intended more to free up his tiny staff than as any real attempt at advancing his vampiric line.

Then Jeff had begun to change. Where he would normally stay up all night and sleep in until noon, the ginger was sleeping at nine at night, waking at five in the morning. Then a young man who could never have learned the complicated process of swimming was found frolicking in the surf one morning, not only defying his disorder, but Nikola's security as well.

After the second treatment Jeff escaped his room again, used advanced logical reasoning to track down the vampire and held a lengthy conversation with him. Where he would normally have touched and dropped everything in Nikola's lab, Jeff was able to sit with pen and paper in hand doodling. His intelligence level had advanced from that of a five year old to that of a fifteen year old. Nikola had quickly found a microphone and recorded the entire episode.

"Within a week's time your intelligence and ability had advanced so much, there was no way to keep you there without creating and instilling a cover story, something I took great pains to craft. Admittedly it wasn't perfect but I had so little time. Your father would return in a month, expecting his mentally disadvantaged progeny to be returned to him none the worse for wear, and you…" Nikola gestured to the now damp, intelligent and relatively normal human before him. "You were not his son anymore."

Above them another flash of lightning and a clap of thunder sounded, far too close for comfort. Both men snapped their gaze upward before Nikola stepped away from the tower. He led the way down the stairs and for once Jeff followed without complaint. They had just ducked through the double doors and into the protected stairwell when the patter of rain became a torrential downpour.

Nikola made sure that the doors were securely closed before he leaned back against one of the narrow, close walls. Jeff started down the stairs ahead of him, moving without pause until he reached the landing and his knees seemed to give out. Tesla watched him long enough to be sure he wasn't about to careen head long down the stairs, then settled himself, wet, cold and bone weary on the top step.

"You sent Miss Magnus after me…" Jeff said, his voice filtering up through the dimly lit stair well.

"Yes." Tesla admitted.

"And you wanted my blood."

"Yes."

"Miss Magnus said…she said she should be grateful you didn't try to kill me."

For a moment Tesla panicked, wondering where the kid had gotten that idea. It took him a moment to remember the conversation in Helen's office. The deception he was creating at the time. How that would have sounded to anyone overhearing.

It had never been a part of his plan to kill Jeff. Tesla could no more take the young man's life than Jeff's own father could. The ex-vampire shook his head, letting his chin rest on his chest, his arms propped on his knees.

He had no convincing answer. Thankfully it seemed Jeff didn't need one.

After a long moment he heard the still body on the landing chuckle. "I saved _your_ life."

Tesla thought about it. He thought about Mexico, then about his depression following Columbia. Then the moment he remembered that Jeff was still out there. Somewhere. That even with the source blood from the Cabal gone there was still a chance that one of his experiments carried his genetic markers. Then realizing that if he knew as much, it wouldn't be long before the Cabal did too, he'd never been good at covering his trail.

Even if that hadn't 'saved his life', the moment when Jeff planted his feet in the Cabal agent's chest and redirected the gun shot certainly had.

Tesla took a deep breath and said, "Thank you." He made sure the words were loud and clear and earnest.

"I would get him to write that down..." Helen said in the darkness, her crisp accent bright and brilliant, breaking into his heart like a laser through diamond. "It's the last time you'll hear him say it, believe me."


	12. Part III - Nikola - The Plan

Chapter 12

"Helen!" Her name slipped out of his mouth before he could choke it back. He heard her footsteps coming up the stairs and watched as Jeff's head rolled to the side, following Helen's ascent.

"Jeff, what's happened to you?" Helen asked, kneeling on the landing beside the experiment and pulling a small penlight from the pocket of the fetching dark blue wool coat she was wearing. She gave the red head a little time to adjust to the light before she flashed it in his pupils, watching them dilate.

"The cable…the cabat…the-"

"We were attacked by the Cabal. They injected him with tranquilizers before their attempted kidnapping." Tesla explained from the shadows at the top of the stairs.

"I assume that was the reason for the twelve car pile-up down town." Helen asked rhetorically, putting one finger up in front of Jeff's face and telling him to follow it as she moved it to the left and right. Apparently satisfied with the results Helen put the pen light in her jacket and pushed back the sleeve of her coat, looking to her watch. "The Cabal. I can't say I'm surprised. Your message was alarming on its own…" Helen checked her patient's pulse against the second hand allowing a full minute to go past before she started to stand. "But when I connected it with your disappearance and we couldn't find Mr. O'Donnel anywhere in the Sanctuary, I-"

Helen froze mid-sentence as soon as she saw him. Even in the shadowy stairwell Nikola could see the color drain from her face. He felt what remained of his energy drain along with it and leaned his head against the wall closest to where he sat, a tired smile spreading across his face.

The lines around Helen's mouth tightened and she frowned, "Nikola…"

"It's not as bad as it looks…" He told her, lazily, though if they were going to start talking about how it _felt_…

Her usually business like voice softened with what might have been concern, "I'll be the judge of that," she said. She climbed the stairs towards him using the penlight to look over the small cuts on his face and neck and check his pupils and pulse as she had with Jeff. She was quick to notice the swelling in his right hand.

"Punch someone did you?" She asked softly, her thumb gently exploring the swollen area, checking on the damage.

Nikola tensed and cleared his throat to cover what might have been a moan of pain. He'd been ignoring the agony in his hand up to that point, quite successfully, by leaving it be. "I found it was my only recourse. I don't possess your ability to magically produce weapons out of my-Ah!"

He was cut off when Helen grabbed hold of the offending digit and pulled, correcting the knuckle and snapping his finger back into place in one quick move. His hand was set ablaze with pain and he got the impression that she had duel purposes with her act. He thus, finished his sentence cautiously. "My pockets."

"Move it around for me.." Helen said and Nikola began to grin forcing her to quickly clarify, "Your fingers, Nikola."

He did so, waggling them stiffly at her before she nodded and looked down to where Jeff was trying to stand. He was woozy and slow but moving.

"Alright Nikola, speak."

"Are the children here?"

"Will and Kate are waiting below on the first floor, Biggie is at the base of the stairs and Henry is in the car."

Tesla gave the woozy Jeff a sidelong glance then returned his gaze to Magnus. "I'll need Heinrich and his abilities. I assume you've chosen to park in the back."

"Yes in the service entrance."

"Excellent…" Nikola stood with Helen's help then passed her, moving down the stairs to where he could help the struggling Jeff to his feet as well. "You didn't happen to see any-"

"Cabal agents lurking outside the building?"

Nikola shrugged and Helen shook her head. "Subtlety was never one of your talents, Nikola."

The three moved down the stairs to the second landing, a slow lumbering creature.

"It never needed to be. Until I met you." Tesla said then nodded to the giant sasquatch standing at the base of the stairs. He casually cast Jeff off into the hairy one's care before turning to see that Helen made it to the landing without mishap.

"Judging by the number of un-Tesla'd SUVs parked around the block we've at least a dozen agents if not more. They haven't narrowed their search to this building yet, but it won't take them long."

"Very well," He said with a satisfied sigh, before he tilted his head to the side and asked, "Un-Tesla'd?" In answer to his amused question Helen's mouth opened in a fetchingly silent manner before she admitted.

"Will's word."

Less amused Tesla nodded. "I have created the honey pot, and attracted the bear, now we need only set the trap."

"Am I to assume, based on your message, that this trap in some way involves faking a death?"

Tesla grinned brightly at Helen. "3327"

Helen crossed her arms and pursed her lips, but he could see the amusement in her eyes. "Your favorite hotel room at the New Yorker."

"And the place where you so graciously freed me from the constraints of the public eye."

"Are you suggesting we give him a heart attack?" Helen asked, her eyes flickering away from Nikola's briefly when both Big Foot and the experiment reacted.

Nikola wrinkled his nose in distaste, flicking a glance back to the red head. "No, far too conventional." Then he smiled. It took her a moment but Helen caught on.

"No, Nikola."

"Where's the harm? We draw them in, we reduce the size of your enemy by a great many numbers and rid the city of a pesky building that would otherwise take millions to demolish."

Helen stared at him in shock for a long beat before she shook her head and walked away from him. "Unbelievable."

He had, up to that point, found no problem with the plan. Given that they stood in an abandoned science building, full of closets and storerooms of chemicals, overflowing with the means with which to make enough explosives to destroy the building. There were no occupied buildings near by and he knew this site was one of many scheduled for eventual demolition.

"Do you really expect them to allow us to waltz out of here?" Tesla called after her, pushing his jacket back so that he could settle his hands on his hips. He heard Helen's footsteps stall. "They've shot at me already today and they won't hesitate to do it again. They want Mr. O'Donnel at any cost, and yes I will take responsibility for that, but I will do it my way, Helen."

The tension in the air increased and Tesla knew it was due to the Pandora's box he had just reopened. "All I need is Henry. You should take the others with you and get as much distance from the place as possible. He and I will see to the explosives and I guarantee you his safety."

Anger flashed briefly in Helen's eyes and she started back towards him again. Tesla waited for the diatribe but was surprised when he saw her emotions morphing as she approached. At the last moment she turned to face the Big Foot and spoke quietly to him. An unhappy grunt emitted from the creature before he turned, gently guiding Jeff along with him, heading for the stairs.

Helen waited for the doors to close in the stairwell before she turned to face Nikola. "You won't be needing Henry."

Nikola gave a grunt of protest, but before he could say anything Helen interrupted.

"Because you'll be using me."

Anger flared, following closely behind the spike of fear. "No."

"It's my help, or none Nikola."

Vastly unhappy with the turn of events Tesla spun away from her, stalking into the darkness of the open hall. The collection of emotions swarming through him were coming from a number of different sources.

Disappointment in her continued distrust, anger at her stubbornness, at her tendency to far too quickly sacrifice her brilliance and beauty for the sake of her underlings. Worse still he knew that the job of arming the building appropriately could not be done with only one person in so little time. He needed someone's help.

"Why? Helen? What are you trying to prove?" He demanded turning back around. "I-is this punishment? Am I to be made to feel guilty, or ashamed of myself? Am I meant to repent now and change my ways." He advanced as he spoke, drawing to within a few feet of her before he said, "Do you really think I have no conscience?"

She said nothing, her face a mask of tight muscles and narrowed blue eyes.

Nikola shook his head and turned. He released a short laugh that he barely felt and paced away from her a few feet. "I experienced something in Mexico that I haven't felt since before our days in Oxford. Do you know what it was?" He waited, wanting that certain tilt of the head. Wanting some response from Helen before he continued what felt very much like a lecture to an empty room.

"Uncontrollable, baffling excitement. The joy of the chase. The pure fulfillment that comes from scientific discovery for the sake of itself. And it had nothing to do with the Brat Pack or source blood or…something happened to that man…" Nikola pointed beyond Helen, towards the door that the red head and the beast had disappeared through. "That I still can't explain."

He fell silent, his eyes remaining focused in the distance, on the door, on the mystery that had slipped through it.

"You knew his blood would have no affect…" Helen said, starting to put the pieces together.

"I…had my suspicions."

"This…all of this…had nothing to do with your vampirism…at all..did it?"

Tesla winced, his face giving the slightest acknowledgement; still not sure he wanted to meet her eyes.

"Nikola!" His name came from her mouth sharp and angry, against his will he snapped his gaze back towards her and was shocked to see her smiling at him.

He started to smirk a bit as well, his brow confused, but his lips delighted.

"Well done, Nikola." She said, tapping a hand against his chest before she walked away from him.

He stood for a moment, dumbfounded, backtracking through the conversation to find something, anything that would explain what had just happened.

Turning around at the end of the hall Helen looked back at him, silhouetted in the light filtering through a dingy window. Woolen coat falling halfway down her thighs, which were perfectly incased in a knee length skirt. Heels that she could somehow run in.

"Haven't we got a bomb to make?" Helen asked.

Nikola grinned and clucked his tongue with a shake of his head. She never failed to surprise him, never in over a hundred years.


	13. Epilogue - Magnus

Epilogue

_I managed to convince Nikola that it wasn't necessary to destroy the entire building. The storm that had been brewing over the previous hours had reached its full force. There was enough wind and lightning for me to be concerned about a large fire raging out of control. _

_I also suggested to him the need for some evidence to be left behind. We were able to find some anatomy skeletons, yes in a closet, in the basement and after confirming that they were made from actual human bone we placed them near what became the epicenter of the explosion. _

_We decided to make it as logically accidental as possible. In a very short time we had collected and put in place the necessary chemicals and accelerants. After finding a safe rendezvous point Nikola lit the accelerant. We escaped without harm. The explosive, set around the central support beams in the basement of the building, caused secondary explosions in the laboratories above and caused the building to implode such that any evidence has been well buried. _

_In monitoring tonight's news casts alone I am convinced that the Cabal and the Old City Police and fire departments will be busy for some time sorting out the mess, especially given the recent drop in temperatures. _

_William, Henry, Kate and Big Guy successfully extracted Mr. O'Donnel. I am told that they wrapped him in their coats before pulling him from the building and once in the car, he was told to' lie down and be quiet.' He promptly lost consciousness, the result of the strain of his previous battle and the tranquilizers he had been subjected to. As of this entry he is resting, once more in his room, here in the Sanctuary. Will has decided that Jeff is trust worthy, even if he feels Nikola and his influence are not._

_Mr. Mastiff has disappeared. After I escorted him from the property so that I could tend to Nikola's message, the security cameras show him climbing into his vehicle and leaving. I have resources watching for his car but as it was a rental, I doubt we will see it again. _

_Nikola has explained some of what led up to this episode, and promises to reveal everything before the weekend. He seems shaken, and less aloof than I would expect. This may have something to do with the conversation I overheard between him and Jeff. _

_For now I have ordered that he rest. His use of his magnetic abilities appears to have negative physical side effects, most notably an increase in fatigue and signs of aging. _

_I don't believe it wise to tell him, but I am proud of Nikola. He has shared more of his research with me and we both feel that he may have stumbled upon a useful application for his DNA restructuring technique, as well as an altruistic purpose for seeking out more samples of the source blood. Yet another in a long list, but perhaps the first that Nikola has provided. _

_I am never able to explain to Will what it is between Nikola and I. Respect of course for his accomplishments, and our connection with the Five, but more…much more that I've not shared with anyone. _

_Nikola is a charming, infuriating, lovable but distant-_

"Writing a letter?"

Helen's pen halted and she had to fight the impulse to shield what she had written from the piercing blue eyes now gazing down at her.

She took off her reading glasses and placed them over the black arches and sweeps and looked critically up at Nikola. Where he stood in her office, in the fading firelight, she could see that some of his color had returned. The scratches on his face were still angry reminders of the day's events but he was upright, and it seemed, moving a little easier than before. He was clean again, too, which was a blessing for all of them.

He'd chosen a light blue shirt, and dark gray sweater and slacks combination for the evening that she found very pleasing. He was also standing with one of his hands behind his back, his eyes bright and expectant, a smirk waiting at the corner of his mouth.

He reached his hand over the books stacked on the edge of her desk, trying to turn her journal so that he could read the words she'd crafted there. Clearing her throat Helen stopped him by gently closing the journal on her pen and folding her hands over top.

"Ah…" He said then presented what he had held behind his back by setting it carefully on her desk top. The bottle was old, dusty, showing its age in both the glass and the tan colored label.

"The '45 Bordeaux! But I thought-"

"Helen…" He chastised. "Don't tell me my clever little mock up fooled you. You didn't notice the creaseless label, or the modern density of the cork? I drink your wine because I value it, and value the years it represents. I would hardly take something so priceless only to use the bottle."

He was right, damn him, and she realized it now as she turned the Bordeaux in her hands. Compared to the bottle that she, Will and Kate had found in her wine cellar, the one she now held was familiar. She had forgotten the picked at corner of the label, the sweat stains left by her thumb and forefinger.

Helen set the bottle on the wood of her desk again, right next to the stains that Mastiff had left hours earlier.

She looked beyond the reflection of light dancing on the glass to the man that had brought it. "How are you feeling?"

The question caught her off guard, even as it came from her mouth, and seemed to do the same to Tesla. She had intended it as a means to gauge his physical condition but even as she asked she realized that so many other things about the ex-vampire had been altered.

From Mexico to Columbia to Old City they had traveled together down converging paths. Parts of him would always be the same, she knew, but some of him had changed. And they, together as friends, old old friends, had grown.

After a moment of thought, Nikola's eyes moved from hers to the bottle. "Thirsty…" He said, and then grey eyes flickered back to her own, a slow smile beginning.

Helen blushed slightly and smiled pushing back in her chair. She grabbed the Bordeaux by the neck with one hand while she rooted through her top drawer for the cork screw. She was not at all surprised to see a pair of wine glasses suddenly in Nikola's hands.

Tesla took the cork screw and bottle from her and pierced the seal, then the cork. When he paused, his eyes moving past her and settling on the window behind her desk, Helen followed his gaze. At first she was unable to see beyond the window frame, the darkness beyond the Sanctuary only alleviated by the lights from Old City.

A moment later a handful of flakes drifted by. She heard the music of well-aged wine settling into glasses and looked back as Nikola handed one to her. The bouquet was pleasant, if strong, instantly transporting her back to London, to the men and women she fought beside so many years ago. As the snow continued to fall outside she perched on the corner of her desk, Nikola standing comfortably beside her.

She took a sip and let the wine settle on her tongue then slide pleasantly down her throat. She heard a satisfied sigh from Nikola as well.

"Excellent taste, Winnie, old boy." He said, toasting the window.

Helen thrust her glass in the air before he could bring his back to his lips. "To Winston." She said, and was surprised and pleased when Nikola repeated her toast and drank.

As she pulled her glass away the word came to her. The one she would write at the end of the sentence. The word that best described Nikola.

_-oddball!_

* * *

_Thank you for reading and hopefully enjoying. I wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving and Holiday season._

_-Gunney_


End file.
